Chris Crawford on: Collaboration 2.0 – A Game-Changing 'Social Strategy'

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Collaboration 2.0 – A Game-Changing 'Social Strategy' That Radically Evolved Our Employee-Client Ecosystem

By Chris Crawford, Accenture’s director of Social Computing and Collaboration

"To put it simply, Collaboration 2.0 is Accenture’s Industrial Revolution: it has changed the way we work, learn, communicate and collaborate. As director of social computing and collaboration, I’m amazed at how viral our social computing platform has become, creating one of the largest suites of enterprise social computing tools on the planet. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, we put our people’s needs front and center in our approach to social media. We first determined why we should add the capabilities (by examining which existing public tools were generating groundswell in our organization) and then determined how we should get there. And for us, the “we” encompasses a magnitude of 190,000 people across 120 countries.

It’s a strategy that is in stark contrast to what we see many companies doing: selecting the latest flash-in-the-pan social computing tools, and doing so before understanding their users’ needs.

With Collaboration 2.0, tasks now take minutes, not days. Projects are no longer stuck in e-mail or red tape. Employees easily convene with experts who illuminate answers. They manage projects by sharing desktops and creating groups. And they connect and share key information with clients via these same tools. (See BusinessWeek's article Company ‘Federations’ to Share Data.)

We hope you enjoy learning about our game-changing groundswell story and how we’ve revolutionized our entire corporate workflow....."

The Full Post is a Must Read!:

http://www.accenture.com/Global/Services/CIO/Collaboration.htm

Great Look Back by ARG Player: Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A. I. Game - Jay Bushman | ETC-Press

Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A. I. Game 12/14/2010
Jay Bushman

Vertices and Vortices

On the evening of May 6th, 2001, I dawdled on the corner of 4th Street and Avenue A in New York City, trying to decide if I really would attend a rally for the Anti-
Robot Militia.

I wouldn’t know anybody there. Sure, I had corresponded with some of them through an online message board. And after chickening out of the first gathering, I’d gone to the second cell meeting the week before – a dozen or so tentative geeks communing in an empty mid-town dining room, gingerly feeling each other out over our shared obsession with a strange series of websites. But this would be different. Even though the rally was taking place at an East Village bar, it was ostensibly going to be in the world of the “game.” Nobody knew what to expect, although speculation was rampant. But this would be more than just kibitzing about an online curiosity. This was the real world.

I thought about going home. It was a Sunday night. I could skip a strange evening with a bunch of weird geeks, turn in early and get ready to face Monday morning. I could read about what happened behind the safety of my monitor. Standing on that corner, I hesitated.

At last, I chose the road with the robots and the weirdoes. And that has made all the difference.

Evan is Dead, Jeanine is the Key

The “game” in question had no name. After the experience was all over, we learned that the designers – we had named them the “Puppetmasters” or “PMs” – had no real name for it either. They called it “The Beast,” at first because an early asset list contained 666 items and later because of the havoc that the ever-expanding experience wreaked on their lives. These days, it’s sometimes described as “The A.I. Game” or “The A.I. Web Experience,” dull monikers that give the bare minimum of information necessary to open conversation with a non-initiate.

In the middle of the scrum we called it “Evan Chan,” after the story’s first victim. Most often it was nameless, too new and multifarious to be contained by any kind of description we could invent. Like religion or art, it couldn’t be explained to anybody who didn’t already get it. Or at least, in the rush of spring 2001, that’s how it felt to the initial converts.

Great Year Review!: A Look Back at the Year in Alternate Reality Games: 2010 Edition | ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network

The State of the Industry

Alternate reality games aren’t dead, but they have certainly evolved over the past year, as terms like “transmedia storytelling” and “gamification” have insinuated their way further into the developmental lexicon. In April, the Producer’s Guild of America added the “transmedia producer” credit to their Code of Credits, swiftly followed by the formation of the rival Transmedia Artists Guild in July, which aims to provide a support structure for creators. Prominent figures in the entertainment industry including Anthony Zuiker, Tim Kring, and Guillermo del Toro have all publicly committed themselves to transmedia production. Meanwhile, Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk on gamification as a means of leveraging our penchant for play for social good has reignited interest in serious games.

Jay Bushman does an exemplary job of articulating the industry’s formative state in his article about his time as a Cloudmaker, a name affectionately adopted to describe players of the genre-defining alternate reality game for the film A.I.. Bushman notes that the state of the industry can be analogized to the film industry circa 1926, before the release of The Jazz Singer manifested the argument for talkies. As Bushman explains, The Jazz Singer “was not the first film with sound, but it was the first one to make its benefits obvious and to show that sound was the way forward.”

ARGs as a Promotional Tool

Alternate reality games still earn their proverbial bread and butter as a promotional tool, and this year has seen a number of stand-out projects.

ARGs in Film

This year, the film industry relied on tried-and-tested formulas to leverage alternate reality games as film promotion. Following up on the immense popularity of the Cloverfield viral, JJ Abrams has released a series of cryptic clues hinting at the story for his newest low-budget project, Super 8. While Cloverfield‘s game centered around Tagruato Corporation’s Slusho beverage, Super 8 has introduced Captain Coop’s Rocket Poppeteers brand popsicles. Similarly, in order to capitalize on the popularity of Wired’s Hunt for Evan Ratliff, Repo Men staged a month-long manhunt for four volunteer runners charged with protecting artificial organs known as “artiforgs.” Ciji Thorton and Usman Akeju were caught at a roller skating rink in Lanham, Maryland, while Will LaFerriere and Alex Gamble survived the full month.

Early December marked the end of the Flynn Lives alternate reality game, a multi-year promotional campaign building up to the release of Tron: Legacy. 42 Entertainment handled the campaign’s lengthy run in a manner reminiscent of its award-winning Why So Serious campaign for The Dark Knight by releasing large batches of content every few months. A highlight for the campaign occurred at San Diego’s Comic-Con, where the development team transformed a nearby warehouse into the End of Line club from the film for a special night of festivities. Players were frequently rewarded with collectible coins, posters, pins, t-shirts, stickers, badges, and postcards for interacting with the story: many of these items hid clues that advanced the story. Flynn Lives leveraged its Facebook integration to allow players to showcase the numerous online badges awarded for reaching particular in-game milestones.

ARGs in Television.....

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