This evening seminar will chart the rise of social software and examine how these technologies might be employed in a commercial and business context.
Blogs have put social software in the news again. Big players such as Google and AOL are buying into the technology, and they're not the only ones trying to find commercial applications for software that supports group interaction.
All pivotal internet technologies move from being the preserve of a small, committed, technically literate subculture towards mainstream cultural acceptance and commercial exploitation. With over a million users and rising, blogs are well on their way along this road.
But can social software realistically be employed to serve commercial ends - or does it, by its very nature, resist being harnessed in this way?
And if social software - such as weblogs, wikis, online networks and communities - does have a place in business, what is it? Could combinations of lightweight, readily available applications come to replace expensive corporate knowledge management systems and enterprise software, for example? Or introduce new business models for the publishing industry?
The presentations, questions and discussion will be followed by drinks and networking.
Speakers
Speakers include:
Will Davies, Senior Researcher,
iSociety
William works in the research team at The Work Foundation on
the iSociety programme. He specialises in social capital and
network theory, social software, and the ways in which
membership associations can benefit from these, in particular,
unions and professional associations. In May 2003, he published
an iSociety report, 'You Don't Know Me, But...: Social Capital
and Social Software', exploring uses for the internet in
supporting social networks. He was recently the lead contributor
to a collection of essays, The
Professionals Choice - The Future of the Built Environment
Professions.
Lee Bryant, Director, Headshift (www.headshift.com)
Lee Bryant is a founding Director of Headshift - a specialist
Internet consulting firm with a focus on the social impact of
information and communication technologies. He has seven years
experience of building and managing successful businesses in
this sector, during which time he has managed a number of
award-winning projects for both public and private sector
organisations. He is passionate about using technology to
facilitate self-representation, and has been programming
computers since he was 10 years old. Lee is also the author of
'Smarter, Simpler, Social', a paper
providing an overview of the development of social software.
Louise Ferguson, Digital Habitats (www.louiseferguson.com)
Louise Ferguson is a technologist and user experience
consultant, with an academic background is in human-computer
interaction and computer-supported cooperative working. She is
on the board of the UK Usability Professionals' Association
and co-leads the UPA's international voting and usability
project. She has been involved in designing systems since she
left university in the 1980s and has wide-ranging professional
experience, from researching what environmental pressure groups
and scientists want from oil company websites to conducting
ethnographic research into employees' experience of
collaborative systems in a range of public and private sector
contexts. She takes a particular interest in how we can best
make use of the "things that make us smart" or
"cognition in the wild". Louise has recently launched
her own firm, Digital Habitats.
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