Activities 0

Overview 1

Welcome to the Bootstrap Alliance - a collaborative forum for testing new concepts, and learning with and from peers and leading innovators. Activities include: 1A

• general discussion forums and exchanges 1A1

• special interest groups formed around key frontier challenge areas (e.g. Knowledge Management or Quality) and/or application domains (e.g. Education or Governance) - see NICs below. 1A2

• sponsored projects to push the envelope together in key areas 1A3

• working group teams formed around meta-level issues such as how to make the NICs as effective as possible, including sharing and leveraging across NICs - these are our "MetaNIC Teams" 1A4

To support these activities we offer a collaborative website with online conferencing, calendar, document sharing, etc., plus regularly scheduled meetings and teleconferences. You can tap into the online activities any time of the night or day using your web browser. For more information see the Supporting Services page. 1B

Where to Start 2

You can find everything you need to participate, including what's already happened, right here on our collaborative website. If you are just starting out, please read about our Orientation services. If you are an experienced 'web surfer', you can jump right in with Getting Started. The document Getting the Most out of Your Bootstrap Alliance also provides helpful context and direction. 2A

Discussion Forums 3

Our online discussion forums are hosted right here on our website. To view or post to the discussions, click on Discussion (also found on the toolbar everywhere on our website). To learn more about the online discussion environment, see Support Services - Online Conferencing 3A

Meetings and Seminars 4

Quarterly meetings provide the opportunity to get to know the other participants, and hear from the various project teams and key note speakers, and work on challenges and issues you share in common with the other participants. These meetings feature large and small group presentations, breakout sessions, selected demos, including explicit share and exchange across NICs. 4A

Project teams will also be scheduling their own meetings and teleconferences. Introductory seminars are also scheduled on a regular basis. Stay tuned to the News page for information on upcoming events. Refer to the Archives page for information on past meetings 4B

NICs - Networked Improvement Communities 5

The ideal Bootstrap Alliance member/customer is typically an Improvement Community (IC) - a community with a mission to help its constituent members improve some key capability. Cooperatives, research communities, professional societies, consortia, standards groups, initiatives, and corporate task forces are all examples of ICs. The ICs of special interest to the BA members are ICs whose improvement target is well aligned with parts or all of the Bootstrap vector, such as knowledge management, virtual teaming, collaboration, and/or learning. These ICs offer added leverage to the collective BA pursuit. 5A

Ideally, an IC will join the BA with two goals: (1) to research future work/learn environments for its constituent members; and, (2) to implement significantly improved work/learn environments for the IC itself to better serve its constituent members - i.e. improve the way it improves - transforming itself into a highly effective, augmented, Networked Improvement Community (NIC). The key attribute that sets a NIC apart from an IC is its infrastructure, specifically its knowledge networking capability (see KDI below), and its improvement strategy. By improving this infrastructure, an IC can significantly augment its capacity to engage the pro-active participation of its constituent members, to integrate their input as well as input from other sources, to identify, evaluate, co-design and implement solutions, and incorporate lessons learned on an iterating basis. One central objective of the Bootstrap Alliance is to work toward becoming the most advanced instance of a NIC that its collective membership can muster. 5B

ICs with common improvement vectors, such as a common focus on education and learning, or knowledge management, may form a special interest groups, or even formal meta-IC, within the Bootstrap Alliance. 5C

It is very likely that the high-performance virtual organization of the future will be a network of interacting networked communities and networked improvement communities. Hence, NICs can be viewed as early prototype models for the organization of the future. 5D

We are currently launching a small project to profile participating ICs, and identify where they currently are on their IC-to-NIC transformation path. 5E

Projects 6

Cultivating ICs and NICs 6A

A central activity for participants is to be cultivating their respective ICs and NICs.Participants who do not have a formal IC may work on forming one, participants who have an IC will be working on transforming it into a NIC. Generally, cultivation efforts will be bi-directional, involving working and planning on the one hand with their fellow IC members, and on the other with their fellow Bootstrap Alliance members. See nicslides.ppt for a sample proposal for creating a NIC in the open standards arena. Following are a sampling of NIC cultivation activities: 6A1

1. Generate a similar set of slides for your IC/NIC or project so you can see where you are on the chart, and where you want to be.

2. Identify your customer! The ideal bootstrapping NIC represents a variety of related improvement projects and initiatives working together to leverage their learnings and results. Inventory related initiatives internally and externally. Which ones might you recruit to join your IC? Which problems, challenges, and opportunities might you tackle more effectively as a group vs. individually? For example, a Web Accessibility NIC might (a) keep track centrally of all the web and interface products and services which meet/don't meet accessibility requirements (which otherwise its members are doing individually), (b) turn its central website into an exemplary site, (c) capture best practices and lessons learned, ...

Technology Template Project 6B

This project is building a common Technology Template, a framework with which to design enterprise knowledge environments, evalutate related products and services, influence future products and services, and design pilot outposts. The OHS Framework document is a proposal put forth by the Technology Template steering group as a starting point, intended to be fleshed out and extended based on your input. To view the OHS Framework discussion, goto on Discussion and click on "OHS-doc-talk". 6B1

Telling Our Stories 6C

A central activity for each Improvement Community (IC) participating in the Bootstrap Alliance is to build case study scenarios describing current and future states of their customers' every day work/learn environment, as well as their IC's own work/learn environment, and how to make the needed transformations. This would be a highly collaborative project, ideally including flushing out commonalities across various member ICs, and identifying areas of cooperation that offer significant leverage, with a special focus on what it would take for any/all ICs to become high-performing, virtual, collaborative NICs serving as prototype future virtual organizations. 6B1

Awareness / Intelligence Collections 6D

A core capability for any NIC, and for any organizational unit, is developing the awareness and intelligence about what's happening out there that we should all be aware of. What's happening in the collaborative technologies arena? Internets and intranets? Business process re-engineering? Organizational learning? New initiatives? What are the relevant articles, books, websites, TV shows, conference proceedings, and so on. What products and services are available, how do they compare, who's using them, what have they reported? How are leading organizations positioning to take advantage of these new initiatives and technologies? Do you have pointers to related research we should be aware of, or anything else to add to this collection? 6C1

DARPA has started a small Commercial Awareness project to improve its own ability to track and anticipate the technology arena. Bootstrap Institute has been asked to facilitate this project for DARPA. Marcelo Hoffmann from SRI Business Intelligence Center will be working closely with Doug Engelbart on this effort. The initial focus is a 2-3 year industry forecast of agent technology. We would eventually like to expand this project to include other arenas, other participants, and other customers such as NSF, NIST, NASA, ..., and solicit special project funding to really push ahead in this core capability area. 6C2

Proposed Projects 7

KDI: Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence 7A

The Bootstrap Alliance submitted the proposal Augmenting Knowledge Networks to the newly formed NSF Program on Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI) on May 11, 1998. 7A1

The KDI notion of Knowledge Networks - emcompassing both the human and the technological aspects of interactive, dynamic knowledge/learning environments to support communities - is well aligned with our own community goals and activites. Current Bootstrap projects, such as the cultivation of NICs, the Case Study Scenarios project, the Awareness project, and the Technology Template project, all dovetail right into the KDI scheme. 7A2

Development of this proposal was truly a collaborative effort in and of itself. We would have liked to include many more collaborators in the process, however in the interest of time, we narrowed down discussions to four representative improvement communities of particular interest to NSF, whose letters of support you'll find in the proposal table of contents. We welcome participation in and continued evolution of the proposed project by all members of the Bootstrap Alliance. 7A3

Proposal Summary: As we work together within the alliance to collectively conceptualize the ultimate knowledge environments in which we all might work and learn in the future, and identify existing tools and practices that might begin to fit the bill, a dedicated core staff would begin actually piecing together the closest approximation of one such knowledge environment using available "best-of-breed" practices and web-based tools into a working system. The tools would be augmented by OHS-type functionality wherever possible (for example, making it so we can jump around a file with outline or filtered views created on the fly by java appletts using a standard web browser). We then would use this same system, supported by the core staff, to facilitate our continued discussion, intelligence gathering and analysis (for e.g. what else is out there that we should be looking at and factoring in to the discussion), and refinement of our requirements, all the while iterating the system based on our feedback from first-hand experience of operational usage. 7A4

Our discussions, intelligence data, and knowledge products would be captured, integrated, synopsized, indexed, etc. into a well-organized knowledge base. This would serve as an invaluable resource to each of us, along with the evolving tools and practices, as we endeavor to transition our own respective improvement communities into highly augmented *networked* improvement communities, so that they can better transform their end customers in similar ways... 7A5

We feel such a project would be critically important for forging dramatically improved KDI-type capability in the short-term, while keeping sites set on the longer-term direction and vision. 7A6

One or more additional proposals are being contemplated for submittal Feb 1, 1999, round II of the KDI Program funding effort. 7A7

Open Teams Program 8

The Open Teams Program described in the brochure has evolved into the teaming activities we call Networked Improvement Communities (see NICs above). So the Open Teams is more a way of thinking than an activity. 8A

We assume our ultimate common objective is to learn how to cultivate and sustain high performance organizations, teams, and individuals. Rather than going after the whole organization, we will focus initially on teams as "bite-sized" organizational units. If you can characterize an organization as a network of teams, and the virtual organization of the future as a network of virtual teams. 8B

So we think of the Bootstrap Alliance as one big team, and the working groups, or NICs, as individual teams. Participants are representing the interests and needs of their home organization, so we think of the partcipants from Sun as "Team Sun", and participants from GSA as "Team GSA" (it's alright to be a team of 1). We also like to think of a participant's link to his/her respective customers and other stakeholders as a virtual improvement team/community which needs cultivating and facilitating. 8C

Groundrules for Participation 9

[ under development ] 9A

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