Launch of Enterprise 2.0 Task Force

After months of behind-the-scene work, an Enterprise 2.0 Task Force has finally been publicly launched at my firm, marked by the dissemination of an E2.0 survey on collaboration, an intranet web site, and a (scheduled) team meeting. It's worth a look at some of the groundwork that was laid to make this possible, and why we are starting now.

First, a team from the Knowledge Management Department, led primarily by Doug Cornelius of KM Space , educated themselves about Web 2.0 tools and techniques.

Because you can learn a lot by doing, and we should "drink our own Kool-Aid", the KM Team started using a KM team wiki for our projects (using pbwiki.com), set up a Delicious account for the team, adopted RSS feed readers for learning about new events, and two of us (Doug and I) started blogging. Many of us also signed up, or re-energized our accounts, at Linked-In and Facebook. The Goodwin Procter 2.0 Facebook group in particular has become a way for people at the firm to recognize each other's interests in these topics, as well as get to know each other better.

Second, we started to talk to people face-to-face at the firm about what uses these tools might have. Could a wiki be a useful tool for a litigation matter team? Would that extroverted practice area leader like to have a blog as a platform from which to orate?

Third, we drafted a SurveyMonkey survey (yes we used a wiki) to help us identify people interested in E2.0, including potential "early adopters", and to start to spread the word.

When it came time to go live, we were able to get a tremendous amount of information up in a very short amount of time. We have:

• Lists of who is blogging at the firm already, with links to the blogs;
• A feed of posts from the blogs;
• Links to a firm Facebook group;
• Links to a Facebook group that the last class of summer associates pulled together;
• A fairly extensive firm-specific tag cloud on Delicious of web sites to educate people further about Web & Enterprise 2.0;
• Descriptions, in terms lawyers can understand, of wikis, blogs, RSS, and social networking software, and how they might work inside the firm, with links to descriptive videos (thank you Common Craft); and last but not least,
• A simple non-interactive list of the task members, people already committed (to some extent) to Enterprise 2.0 tools and collaborative methods.

We timed the launch for February 2008 because implementation of Sharepoint 2007 is not far off. Sharepoint's internal communications abilities, wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds from every imaginable page or webpart, should let us implement some of the ideas the task force will develop.