I’m sure you’re aware of the tag line for this year’s Lotusphere, because you’re reading this, so you’re already getting social. I spoke a couple of days ago about my personal experiences, culminating in a very enjoyable and well-attended session yesterday. But I’m sure that will just be another small step down the road.
I also met another example of social networks having a huge impact. If you’re in the UK and follow cricket, you may be aware of @Aggerscricket and @theashes towards the end of last year. The cricket series between England and Australia is called The Ashes and a young twenty-something something woman from America had the Twitter name @theashes. A few innocently-intended tweets from @Aggerscricket and the followers of and tweets to @theashes rocketed, pestering the poor woman about cricket, on which she knew nothing. Then came the twitter campaign of Get theashes to the ashes. Soon afterwards, @theashes was travelling all expenses paid to Australia having lunch with Steve Waugh and interviewing the Australian PM, before appearing on Test Match Special.
This Week in Lotus pushed a similar campaign to send Sharon to Lotusphere. Yesterday at lunch I got chatting to someone from City University in London, glanced down at her badge which read Sharon and everything clicked. This was Sharon Bellamy, the ‘celebrity’ (sorry, Sharon, but you are now!). A short chat with her showed exactly why she was very deserving of the campaign, with a huge wealth of knowledge and an effervescent passion about all things Lotus and Websphere. We were also discussing the benefits of being social, something she’s practised for a long time. Neither of us needed any persuasion about why it’s important – no, CRUCIAL – to be social if you want to be effective in business. Silo mentalities get things done, but at a slower pace and at lower quality than social business. I would be confident that this week will help her do business better, not only from the learning but also from the contacts Sharon has made.
More examples of that came out of today’s keynote. We saw several examples of how crowds produce better results than just seeking out a single perceived expert. After all, who knows all the experts in their field?
And that follows very well onto a larger example of “Get social. Do Business”: the yellowverse. Lotus has a vibrant and passionate community, but importantly a community that isn’t afraid to be honest. Honest opinions when backed up with good supporting documentation get results. Would GetDocumentByKey have got fixed as quickly if Erik Brooks had not effectively raised the pain points for developers? This week we’ve seen announcements of and evidence of significant speed improvements of XPiNC thanks to the well-reasoned arguments of Sean Cull. If it’s shown that enough people have a major pain point, things sometimes get done. That’s the whole reason behind IdeaJam.
But the community is not just about getting fixes. Getting social improves quality and efficiency, and OpenNTF is a great example of that. OpenNTF has a huge slew of useful projects that can be used and deconstructed, and not just for Domino development. It’s been a crucial resource for understanding plugin development for me over the last few months and the Extension Library project gives great code you can look at to deconstruct how to create your own extensions. And the work Bruce Elgort, Niklas Heidloff, Peter Tanner and the rest of the team have done on intellectual property and licensing is only going to improve the quality and usability of the projects.
Beyond OpenNTF, the yellowverse has a great number of bloggers. These bloggers not only contribute points of view, but also share their learning and expertise. Why? I would posit that it’s not primarily to get business, but to share. To get social. But where those first innovators led, others have followed, producing a wonderful set of resources of learning. So leads may not get generated, but speed of development is improved and pain points minimised. That results in faster, better delivery of quality applications. I am optimistic, so I would also hope it increases the confidence and maintains the enthusiasm of developers. Just look at XPages. Declan Lynch’s massive XPages tutorials certainly helped me when I started developing XPages as did the work of others like John Mackey. They maintained my enthusiasm in the power of XPages and helped me deliver to time and requirements, and make my first XPages development a big success. I know from responses I’ve received that my blog has helped others, and that’s my intention.
Let me be totally frank. More XPages developers and better XPages applications give Lotus Domino and XPages a fantastic reputation. They raise the profile of both XPages and Lotus Domino. They showcase the expertise and collaboration of the Domino community. They ensure that no one can dispute that LOTUS DOMINO IS AN APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM!!!!
Hopefully, that’s what the students who came on Monday have seen. That Lotus Notes & Domino is alive. That Lotus Notes & Domino is up to date. That Lotus Notes & Domino is the future and something they NEED to learn. Because if they get that message because we have got social, if we all keep evangelising and the message is amplified by IBM, we will all do plenty of business.