The Competitive Edge is back for its second live event, bringing together two visionary scholars and researchers of online collaboration as it is effectively applied to real world situations inside and outside small and large organizations.

Stuart Henshall and Eugene Eric Kim are the “expert” thought-leaders that will be engaging our elite audience of industry experts, marketing VPs and industry CEOs in a live audio/video exchange this upcoming Thursday at 12 noon NY time.

Stuart Henshall is a highly qualified communication technologies expert and business researcher analyzing how social networking tools and other collaboration technologies change the patterns and the ways in which we create and share our work.

I have interviewed Stuart before on the Future of Web Conferencing and he has shared some of insight and keen viewpoints on some of the critical issues that affect the future of both end users and the technology companies developing and refining these tools.

Sprung by curiosity I contacted him and found him to be a truly fascinating character.

Stuart has strong point of views and truly rides ahead of the majority of normal users, at least when it comes to collaboration, interaction, publishing.

As he says himself, he is an "early adopter"; someone that tries out early the emerging tools while immersing himself in heavy and continued use of those tools already on the cutting edge.

Nonetheless his idiosyncratic corners, to me Stuart has been a true master artist. Master because he appears to have used extensively what he talks about, and artist because he has opened for me new ways to look at how I do things with new technologies and at how this can truly affect and improve the results that I want to achieve.

Stuart defines himself a “Scenario Practicioner” and as such he often tries to envision way eahd of others what things are going to be like if we start changing the way we do certain things. For example he has been the one to turn me on about using multiple monitors for live collaboration and I must say that his insight into this is indeed timely.

The second special guest at The Competitive Edge this week is Eric Eugene Kim. Eugene lives in San Mateo California, a 45-minute drive from Stuart Henshall home in San Francisco.

Eugene is the author of “A Manifesto of Collaborative Tools” a landmark essay on what needs to be done in order to create a future of effectively useful collaboration technologies (the article is to be published on this month issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal) and as Eugene correctly puts it, a manifesto about “why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it”.

Eugene Eric Kim is also the founder and Executive Director of Blue Oxen Associates, a think tank devoted to improving collaboration and knowledge management and he has written for a number of publications, including Scientific American, PricewaterhouseCoopers's Technology Forecast, and Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History (Fitzroy Dearborn 2001), and is now working at his second book, a history of free software entitled, Software, Money, and Liberty: How Source Code Became Free.

In his manifesto Eugene makes some very critical points that need to be addressed before our collaboration technologies can truly become effective productivity tools. In summary these are:

a) Our software tools -- particularly in the collaboration space -- are nowhere close to fulfilling their potential.

b) We must be people-centric when designing and building applications, and we must work with other developers to make our tools more interoperable. This also applies both to how we design our tools, and how we market them.

c) The natural starting place for building people-centric applications is the user interface. The opportunities to improve here are endless, and the increasing number of publications in this area show that people are paying greater attention.

d) Researchers should be writing plugins for widely-used open source applications, such as the Mozilla Web browser, instead of developing prototypes from scratch. Open source developers should be scouring academic publications for ideas, rather than simply duplicating the user interfaces in commercial products.

e) [Another] step towards improving our collaborative tools is to make them more interoperable.

f) We need to have a shared conceptual framework for thinking about collaborative tools. A shared conceptual framework for collaborative software would provide a common vocabulary for thinking about and discussing these tools, and would also reveal opportunities for standardization. In order to create this framework, we need to identify the commonalities between different collaborative applications. This can be easier said than done, but we can use Engelbart's ideas as a starting point. Collaborative tools are more similar than we may think. Developing a shared conceptual framework will help reveal those commonalities, which in turn will create opportunities for making our tools more interoperable, and hence more useful. Conversing with our fellow tool builders will help reveal those similarities; creating a shared language will make those similarities apparent to all.

g) The need for tool developers to work on these issues together. Creating a shared conceptual framework is a truly collaborative problem. It will not be solved by a single person in an ivory tower and forced upon the rest of the community. It will require constructive, passionate dialog, open minds, and much experimentation. It will require respect for other people's work and ideas. Most importantly, it will require a shared desire to make the world a better place by improving the way we work together. Be willing to collaborate. We all belong to a community of like-minded tool developers, whether or not we are aware of it. Working together will both strengthen this community and improve our tools.

h) Keep improving. Improvement is an ongoing process. Introducing new efficiencies will change the way we collaborate, which in turn will create new opportunities to improve our tools.

j) Finally, never forget Doug Engelbart's fundamental tenet: Computers should help us become smarter and work together better. Remembering this will keep us on the right track

During this live event I will engage both Stuart and Eugene on many of this highly charged topics, which bear a lot of valuable insight for those who are in fact developing and refining the collaboration technologies we will see in the market soon.

I want to hear from them how developers and companies in these industries can take practical advantage of these issues and convert them into competitive edge advantages for their technologies.

I am curious to find out from them what they see as key obstacles to a larger adoption of these technologies and what steps can be taken on the marketing and communication fronts to make such technologies more user-centered.

Agenda of the event.

Each Competitive Edge event is divided in three parts:

In the first part I interview and engage the two special guests through a series of live questions. Both I and the special guests appear live with both video and audio feeds.
(20’).

In the second part, Eugene, Eric and I respond live to questions posted by everyone attending the event. The questions can be submitted via a dedicated and simple-to-use Q&A facility integrated in the Communicast platform. (20’)

Last, I deliver a personal presentation highlighting my take on trends, new tools, features and on best practices in design and marketing. (20’).

The overall running time of the event is between 60 and 75 minutes.

Access to this event is completely free.

Sign-up now for The Competitive Edge:
http://tinyurl.com/2l35m
this Thursday May 27th at 12 noon (EDT – NY time)

The event is sponsored and made possible by:

http://www.Communicast.com/

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