Andrew McAfee: I know 2.0 when I see it

Is it 2.0? Harvard B-School’s  Andy McAfee looks for three things: Is it freeform?  How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent?

Freeform refers to a place where people can congregate online regardless of role or title.

Frictionless is about the ease of taking part. McAfee talks of avoiding clunky interfaces. I’ll throw in not layering on lots of separate technologies.

Emergence is the whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. It’s when the pattern emerges from the seemingly meaningless dots.

Andy concludes

Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed, in contrast, come up short on the frictionless and freeform criteria. They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one. The tendency to build walled gardens is evidently a deep-seated one, and one that should be questioned far more often than is currently the case.

Freeform, frictionless, and emergence are properties of an effective learnscape but I don’t think they’re enough. These qualities address connections. I would add some richness around the nodes. For a learning ecology (or other 2.0 business environment) to work, participants need to be able to establish and maintain their identities through personal profiles, archives of past activity, and the like.