In part one (see link here) of this two part series we covered what an organizational ecosystem is. In part two we’ll cover how to make them and give some example of how they could work for you. We’ll choose a societal need for our example; there are already lots of examples of high tech ecosystems (see link at Intel HERE or at Microsoft HERE )

What are some points to consider in building an organizational ecosystem?

* Every organization that is a part of the ecosystem needs to get an equal shot at a slice of the pie (be that funding, revenue or accolades), but how an individual organization makes that happen is up to an individual organizations ability. That’s determined by an individual organization ability to deliver it’s service or provide an excellent product. In the case of VME, some companies had better or more sought after products than others while some chose a niche strategy. In the case of cranberries, some farms were bigger or more productive than others and that determined what they would receive.

* The core service or technology that everyone rallies around must answer a real need. You can see this with the cranberry growers needing an association to promote the use of cranberries or in the case of VME solving an industry problem of what to standardize on in terms of a flexible high speed bus architecture. If the core service or technology doesn’t answer some fundamental need in an industry or community then it’s not likely you can get other companies to come behind it for it’s success and the success of the individual companies.

* If the coordinating organizational is a voting organization for standards or approaches, each member organizational gets one vote. So, if you setup an ecosystem that is based around solving a community’s need to feed people who need that assistance and each company that is a part of that ecosystem is voting on decisions within that ecosystem, then each company or organizational, not an individual member, gets a single vote. That makes for a level playing field for decision making regardless of organizational size.

* While two or three organizations may start an ecosystem, usually you have to sell other members on the benefits to join it. Having others join can increase the acceptance of your ecosystems mission within your target audience. In general, the more who join the greater validity of the cause or concept. In many cases, whatever an ecosystem is advocating is more likely to be more accepted than what an individual company is promoting.

But how do you get there?
You get there first of all by seeing a need and determining if your individual organizational has the economic ability or not to make the need happen. In the case of the cranberry growers, it wasn’t possible for them all to be successful individually, and yet, they all had a crop that had economic viability. By coming together they could tackle the problem. But what does coming together mean?

Come together right now…
Coming together is about contributing resources financially and otherwise to create another umbrella organizational that will focus on the larger picture and message such as cranberries are good for you or VME provides for cheaper, more standardized compute hardware over proprietary hardware. The new organizational acts as an umbrella organizational and can fill the following roles:

• Has a director or general manager who can take the organizational helm and, for the benefit of the members, promote the vision of the organizational.
• Establishes meeting times and sets a framework for the member organizations to work together to cast a vision and a mission.
• Insures that there is a legal charter for the organization that all member companies will abide by. It really facilitates this as member companies have their representatives actually do this.
• Sets the policies for the larger umbrella organizational in terms of what issues they will tackle and what they will not but submits to the vote of the members as to what they will actually do.
• Promotes the vision with a variety of public relations means such as magazines or magazine articles, web sites, etc.
• Acts as a networker to establish connections with other allied organizations that might have a parallel path but not the same vision or mission.

So how about an example of how this might work?
So let’s try looking at a societal problem for our example. You can see high tech examples in the links above as well as the examples in part one of this two part series regarding cranberry growers and the VME industry.

One nagging problem in many inner cities is health care for the poor. How does it get done? Many times independent agencies will spring up some funded by churches, hospitals, or by a government or private grant. In some cases those organizations will start small (pediatric checkups for example) then gradually gain a larger footprint as they add more services to expand and improve on their mission. But by developing an ecosystem instead of a monolithic organizational an alternative approach can be considered:

• Smaller independent organizations pull together under an umbrella organization known as Community Health
• Community Health is the primary vehicle driving forward with the promotion of health prevention and treatment in the community, setting standards for how patients are treated, liaison for the group with area hospitals, assists with accreditation work, aids in helping on billing and potentially helps with fund raising
• Smaller independent member organizations such as the dentist, pediatrician, diagnostic lab, even physical therapist focus on what they do best; providing care to the patients who most need it. They also focus on their individual practice so that they can be efficient and profitable enough to serve their patients.
• The umbrella organizational essentially creates a model or standard approach for other new health care providers to plug into to provide more services to the community

So what are the pluses and minuses of this approach

Glad you asked! The down sides may include: possible inefficiency of use of high tech equipment lab or diagnostic equipment (too many organizations have the same equipment), potential for not being able to get funding or large enough block funding as individual organizations are too small, inefficiency in billing resulting in higher overall costs.

The pluses need to be considered too such as: potential for increased competition among the smaller organizations leading to lower costs for the patients, smaller organizations providing a more personal care for the patients, perception by patients that the smaller organizations are more approachable so they seek preventative care (always a less expensive option) more frequently, and job creation from many smaller organizations starting up.

Ecosystems work in nature and they work among organizations too. All they take is a little effort but the benefits gained can help your company and the others involved and, most importantly, your customers.

  When I learned about Greek Mythology in school Homer’s “The Odyssey” was a part of what we studied.
I’ll admit parts were very interesting to read and some parts were not but when a movie entitled, “O’ Brother Where Art Thou” came on TV and looked strangely liked The Odyssey, I was glued to the TV.

The movie, released in 2000, starring George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Chris Thomas King and many others, is set in the 1930′s with three convicts on a chain gang escaping prison. George Clooney is the instigator and convinces his two connected partners to leave with him on the pretense that George had hid $1M from a robbery in a secret location. Well, when the trio break out they start on a eclectic adventure that finds them running into Muse’s, a club wielding bible salesman, a blues guitar star who has sold his soul to the devil, and running smack dab into the wrong side of the Klu Klux Klan. All this while being chased relentlessly by the police.

When my spouse and I first watched this, she turned to me and said, “this is weird, I’m going out with my friends” and off she went while I sat and enjoy the movie. She found it odd with a winding plot that, even though adventurous, was hard to follow. I found the adventures that the trio found themselves beset by during their quest humorous with surprising twists and turns. The soundtrack is fun too, with old time blues tunes appropriately set in.

O’Brother Where Art Though, (for more info on the movie click HERE) is worth the rental fee or if it shows up on cable definitely worth the time to watch it. George Clooney is very good in a different kind of role for him as con man then redeemed man in this modern Homeric class adventure.

So there I was sitting down, cup of coffee in hand staring at a “big” news story in my local paper. The story, covered all this past week was about fluffernutter, that marshmallowey goodness virtually all New England children (and grown up children) love. The flap? Seems a certain legislator was miffed that his son could get a fluffernutter sandwich anytime he wanted during school lunch. The son was tickled pink about that. The dad, a legislator in my state, was not. So what’s a disgruntled legislator to do but take pick up the anti-fluff banner and try and pass legislation limiting the amount of fluff to be served in school lunches! As one parent who was interviewed for the story said, “I basically think it should be up to the parents if they eat it or not. There’s a lot of problems in the schools with stuff besides fluff.” Well said! You can read the wide news coverage on the fluff flap at this link HERE

Fluffernutter, for those of you not in the know, is basically marshmallow in a cream form so you can spread it, or use it in cooking. You can learn about Fluff at the official Fluffernutter site at this link HERE.

So, in defense of fluff, and basically because there’s nothing quite like a fluff sandwich and a glass of Milk, here’s how we whip up a fluff sandwich in my kitchen.

What you’ll need
Fluffernutter
Peanut butter (I prefer an all natural brand as it brings more thickness and heft to the sandwich)
Bread (white bread is the standard choice, but using an all natural whole wheat makes the sandwich stand up to the rigors of assembling the sandwich – trust me you’ll need it)
1 Cup of milk
2 Tablespoons (one for the fluff, one for the peanut butter>

Place the bread on a cutting board, both pieces down and separate. Then, take a tablespoon and plunge it into the fluff. Scoop out a heaping helping and slap it onto the bread. You’ll notice that the marshmallow doesn’t exactly spread by itself as it’s very gooey. Start spreading it about, you may find you need two tablespoons worth of fluff to make it work. This is gooey work and white bread definitely tends to tear so if you choose to use white bread you might need three tablespoons of fluff and sort of plop it down. With wheat bread you have a bit more strength to the bread so you can spread the fluff somewhat better.

After the fluff is spread evenly over the bread use a fresh tablespoon to plunge into the peanut butter and scoop out a tablespoon of peanuty goodness. Spread that evenly over the bread.

Place the fluff piece on top of the peanut butter piece and voila! You have a fluffernutter sandwich. Pour a glass of milk and enjoy. And you’ll be taking a political stand at the same time

I’m not a big activist really. I much prefer welcoming people to my home, making a nice meal with them, sharing a laugh and our lives. That’s as good as it needs to get really. However, the reality is that if you are transgender then you may experience discrimination at some point. I think all of us just want acceptance – not special status or distinct privilege, just acceptance for who we are as men and women and then to go about our lives. Still, discrimination towards transgender folks is real and hence alot of good work is being done out there about that. An update on such work is being held on Thursday, June 22nd at 7pm at MIT in the Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, Room 32-155.

Matt Forman and other staff of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force will be presenting data from the Task Force’s national polling on support for transgender-inclusive non-discrimination laws. There will be a discussion afterwards on the status of:

• Transgender rights movement at the local, state, and national level.
• What laws are passing in other parts of the country?
• What is happening with introduction of a transgender-inclusive Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act?
• What efforts are underway in Massachusetts to pass meaningful statewide protections?
• What are ways that we can all engage to fight discrimination against transgender people everywhere?

On the Red Line Kendall Square stop, directions: http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=32.
For more information visit www.masstpc.org or call 617-983-0219.

(photo courtesy of ZenPanda used under Creative Commons license)

Those of you who follow the Frugal Tech know that we like two things (a) stuff that works (b) a bargain. Pretty much in that order. After-all, if it’s a high tech bargain but doesn’t work then that’s known as a rip-off. We hate those. So we’ve found something that’s BOTH, and we think you’ll like it very much.

The something is Open Office. You can visit their web site at this link here. What is Open Office? Well in their own words:

Open Office.org is a multi-platform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

Free is good, so that meets our (b) bargain criteria. What about (a) though, does it work? Most of you reading this are using Microsoft Office, AppleWorks, or even Corel Wordperfect Office. All of those are splendid options and help you get your job done. But how does Open Office stand up to those? Well a complete review is a bit out of the scope of this cappucino whipping barrista, still we can comment on a few aspects, the common ones we (and probably you) would use everyday. That is their wordprocessor (known as Writer), their spreadsheet (known as Calc) and their presensation developer (known as Impress). We use OpenOffice on an 1 GHz Intel based system under MS Windows XP with 1GB RAM.

Writer
Writer is pretty much perfect. It’s easy to use, seems to be completely compatible with Word (at least for what the average Jane does) and, best of all, with one “click” you can turn any document into a pdf with it. It’s a pretty good deal in my pocketbook! I found Writer to not lack anything that MS Word had and Writer was just as easy to use. In fact, I just downloaded the software and started it and with no training I was able to use Writer. When pulling Word documents in it’s good about 95% of the time. It seems to have problems with things like the error markup feature in Word. One of the nicest things about Writer is that there are so many formats you can save your work to, including XML. This allows you to easily and quickly post to the web. In fact, I found it to be a nice and simple tool to whip up a web page with. With the International Organization for Standards voting in Open Document Format OASIS as the world wide standard for document interchange (see the ISO press release HERE), Open Office is a perfect tool to adhere to that standard for your documents. MS Word doesn’t currently support that format.

Calc
Calc is another well done piece in the Open Office suite. It calculates everything nicely (as it better had!) thankfully so there’s no worries there. It also handles the flat file database part of using your spreadsheet well too, in terms of sorting and quick finds. Again, for what 90% of the people use a spreadsheet for, Calc is really perfect. As with Writer, there was no learning curve, I just downloaded it and was able to start using it immediately. Calc also supports the Open Document Format OASIS standards. All was not smooth sailing though. When it came to easily copying a wide are of spreadsheet cells to move formula’s around, Calc was not nearly as easy to use as Excel. That became a real frustration in using it. Calc is easily as powerful as Excel, it’s just the they implement that feature that makes it frustrating. Still the price of free can’t be beat for an excellent and full featured tool.

Impress
Impress might be the most interesting of the modules. I say that due to what I experienced one day at work. It appeared I had a version of MS Powerpoint that had some sort of bug in it such that the slides I created could not be read by some of my co-worker’s later versions of Powerpoint. As you can imagine, this caused alot of panic when we all found out during a major crunch to get a presentation out! But OpenOffice’s Impress came to the rescue. With it anyone could open whatever version of Powerpoint anyone had and then edit it. And then, either save it back as Powerpoint that anyone could then read in their later versions of Powerpoint or convert it into .pdf so that anyone anywhere could read it. Lifesaver is a mild word. I’ve found Impress to work a bit differently than PowerPoint, not harder just differently. For example, some pieces are easier, such as with tabs at the top of the area that you do your page layout in, making it simpler to move from what view to another. Powerpoint has these at the bottom and they can get confusing. Charting is also different, as full featured as Powerpoint, but feels sighty easier. As with the other two modules there was virtually no learning curve to get up and running.

So what’s not to like?
Open Office, at least running on a Windows PC, is very good, but there are some areas that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how it appears to be somewhat of a memory hog. When I’m running multiple applications at once – MS Excel, Firefox, IBM Lotus Notes database, IBM Lotus Notes email, Skype, Palm – and then run Open Office it seems that within 30 minutes or so my system will slow down. At first this wasn’t an issue but eventually it got to be a real turnoff. The only thing I can attribute it to is that Open Office, at least under Windows, is a memory hog. Running Open Office under Windows by itself isn’t an issue, it seems to get all the elbow room it needs. The other thing is that Open Office seems to open slowly. We are not talking minutes here, more like 30 seconds or so. That might be the configuration of my system, I don’t know, but it’s something to be aware of. All in all, whether an application opens in 15 second or 30 seconds for the average Jane doing work I’m not sure matters.

Open Office is free, is open source and is backed by Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Novell, Intel and others and you just have to download it from their site @ http://www.openoffice.org

*Update 07/08/2006*
Microsoft has agreed to support Open Document Format, see Microsoft announcement at this link HERE.