Paul Reynolds is the Director of McGovern & Associates, and blogs at McGovern Online. He presented the second session of the first day, Leveraging the Web 2.0 Ecology on the Corporate Intranet – Myths vs Realities.

Paul wants to outline a framework about what he’s been thinking about for the last year. The framework isn’t formal and all thought out, more a “perpetual beta” (“so people like me never have to finish”). It’s not that he doesn’t want to finish, it’s just that this stuff continues to fascinate him. Paul believes we are inventing the future–in social, in culture–and this is extraordinary energizing. There’s still much to do, so we have to work together.

On Web 2.0:

• Paul doesn’t buy the argument from Tim Berners-Lee that the web was always going to be about “creation” as much as “browsing”.
• O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Meme Map is a helpful point of view. There are some things that seem to come from a parallel dimension, but “the web as a platform” is a key idea … that many organizations haven’t yet caught up with.
• McGovern’s definition of Web 2.0: what: read / write / collaborate, and how: people and tools. Much more simple.
• Paul Anderson’s Web 2.0 Framework (PDF, 64 pages, 1.7 MB) is excellent. Six key ideas: (1) individual production and user orientated content (which raises big questions about authority and relevance), (2) harnessing the power of the crowd (eg, folksonomies … we are seeing a re-energized area; “we know about tags but aren’t really using them properly”), (3) data on an epic scale (“invisible rain is captured by Web 2.0 companies and turned into mighty rivers of information“; ProgrammableWeb.com provides mashups ready to go; TheyWorkForYou.co.nz is a good local example), (4) architecture of participation (opening up content production to all users, eg, TradeMe), (5) network efforts, power laws and the Long Tail (“increase in value as more and more people use it”), and (6) openness (open API, standards and public data; four influencing factors on digital content … (a) public digital space, (b) high-speed broadband, (c) digital convergence, and (d) content on demand).

The challenge of Paul’s presentation is that you have to figure out the implications that Intranets should be a read-write-collaborate space.

Conclusion
We are in the midst of some major changes on the public web, but what about on our Intranets?
– from formal to informal
– from taxonomy to folksonomy
– from open to closed
– from them to us
– from network to my/our/space
– it’s all about people – tools – sources

Paul is a very engaging and interesting speaker, and he’s actually very difficult to take notes on. I hope the above makes some sense; if not, my fault, not Paul’s.