The Web 2.0 era has given us powerful new tools in the form of social networks, and easy-to-use "freemium" online software. Social networks bring together a huge number of talented people. And, the quality of the online software that we supply to these people is constantly increasing, because of the competitive pressure of the Internet. If you get frustrated, the competition is only a few clicks away, so the user experience has to be good, and adoption has to be smooth. In theory, these tools should enable humans to build their civilization faster and more effectively.
In contrast to Web 2.0 style apps, "Enterprise software", which has a captive audience, is typically very hard to adopt, and it works with a finite audience. Although we wish it would go away and stop bothering us, it has the advantage that it is designed to help people do important, specialized, high-value work.
What if we could make some sort of a hybrid of Web 2.0 and Enterprise? This hybrid would bring together a large number of talented people, help them sort out into focused working groups, and provide them with specialized tools for doing the work of their profession. It wouldn't be a social network. It would be a professional network.
We have an example that show us how this can be done. The open source world is already organized this way.
Almost two years ago we set out to build up a professional network for commercial software development. The idea is that we would gather a bunch of software development professionals together online and give them tools for working in consistent way, so they could work on each other's projects. We would support them in the various groups that they worked in - not just the open source groups, or the company projects, but the whole range. And, we would arrange to harness their talent and training to make new software fast.
This would require some infrastructure, as shown in the slide below, from early 2006. The details of what applications we lead off with in the "social" end of the funnel have changed a bit, but we are getting close to hitting the mark as diagrammed.
The idea is that you start on the left side of the funnel (the "social software" end) and gather people together with open applications that we know are easily adopted in huge numbers - user profiles, community news, wikis, etc. Then you move to smaller, more private working groups.
The infrastructure for doing this is generic, in the sense that most professions will require similar infrastructure. The blue circle called "Specialized High-value Apps" is the professional secret sauce, the high-powered rocket fuel for the profession. Software developers commit code to sophisticated source code management systems. Architects make blueprints. Designers need visualization and presentation tools. Doctors need patient records. It's the job of the professional network infrastructure to provide some minimal integration for these tools so that they are available to the team, when and where the team needs them. When we designed the architecture for Assembla, we imagined these tools as being tacked in to extra tabs on a workspace that would start with a set of generic collaboration tools. So, an Assembla space always has tabs for Wiki, Flow (discussion), Team, and Alerts. But if you working on software, you also have Ticketing and Subversion, or Trac and Mercurial. If you are designing, you also have Images. If you are managing projects, you have Staffing and Portfolio.
As you get into the "more structure" end, you might find that you have the typical problems getting people to adopt your tools or processes. However, you are still one click away from the competition, so the competitive pressure makes you better. The key here, I think, is consensus. You might not have the very best way to plan an iterative software development project, or do billing and payment, but everyone understands how its done. So, a new user can drop into your projects and start working right away.
We put this diagram of a generic "professional network" aside while we went to work building the specific instance - the software network at Assembla.com. I'm resurrecting it for this post because I have recently had conversations with people from other fields -science, investment, law, medicine - who are interested in this concept or unwittingly working on variations of it. Maybe it is an idea whose time is coming.