My keynote panel seemed to go well, here’s a five minute video clip.  We announced that VisiblePath is joining SuiteTwo to go beyond wikis, blogs and RSS into Social Networking for the Enterprise.  In a breakout panel we had a chance to explore it further, but the interesting part was the participation from Cisco and P&G, two leading companies that are pragmatically adopting best-of-breed social software.  Both of them agreed with the need for further standards in this area, such as Amo.

Thanks mostly to the effort of Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, Web2Open was a success.  My favorite session was learning about KnowledgeAsPower, something that wouldn’t have made its way to the big stage, trying to apply Web 2.0 to a real problem in politics.  How elected representatives interface with their constituency.

Sarah Schacht noticed a significant disconnect from the policies made just miles away between New Hampshire and Vermont.  Vermont has a greater number of representatives to citizens and potentially as a result was able to develop some better health care legislation in touch with citizen needs.  In the pre-progressive era (1890s) we had the highest voting rates in US history, between 90-94% of eligible voters did.  Largely because elected officials were closer to their constituents.  Town halls were actually held in town halls, or even barber shops.  The Civil Rights movement was borne of this era.

Today the population relative to elected officials has grown, and technology has become more of a problem than a solution.  The media has decreased their role in helping communicate on state issues to constituents. The best help for a citizen who wants to engage on a given issue is the website of a legislative body, but they are just official factual messages that have a 48 hour lag from staffers to website.  So they created a site for the State of Washington that lets a citizen subscribe to a specific issue or bill they are interested in and participate by sending Legislators email.

But the other problem is your average politician is consumed with email.  They use Outlook, and only have 1.5 staffers to help manage 800-1,300 demails per day.  With 90-120 day legislative sessions and lobbyists consuming time — their outbound communication is limited to once or twice per session — via newsletters, mass emails and town hall meetings.  She demoed their potential solution for the first time.  Citizens send email through a slightly structured web interface.  The legislator gets a dashboard for their email, with a row for each bill, enabling them to scan relative interest in different issues, number of emails pro/con and the ability to respond directly to different emergent groups.  I shared Politicopia with the session, which could be a great complement to their effort.

Sometimes we get caught up in the hype of cool social tools and forget that what we are doing is providing alternatives to email for social interaction, armed with backlinks, pings and feeds.  And the real value is when you can apply them to solving a specific problem. 

While my personal interests tend to draw me to such projects, if it wasn’t for Web 2.0 Expo trying a hybrid open source business model with Web2Open, I wouldn’t have found it or a way to contribute.  One person told me that a session by a guy who runs a comic book store was the best he saw in the event overall.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if it became a feeder for the big stage.

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On Tuesday, Socialtext announced that it was the wiki part of an bundle of social software called SuiteTwo-packaged by Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s venture arm-to be sold through Intel channels. The other pieces of the suite are a wiki (Six Apart), a news reader (NewsGator), and an RSS news feeder (SimpleFeed), with SpikeSource supplying the support.

Some grizzled veterans of past software wars reacted with skepticism based on Intel’s well-documented inability to get out of its own way when it tries things not related to his core business. Others questioned the pricing, which is a considerable premium over the cost of each of components alone.

Not suprisingly, among those pronouncing SuiteTwo “no big deal” was Vassil Mladjov, CEO and co-founder of rival Blogtronix, which unveiled the new version of Blogtronix 1.5 on Wednesday which has integrated blogging, wiki, RSS feeds and an online RSS reader, as well as social networking capability.

“We at Blogtronix had all of this functionality more than a year ago under one platform and it was all integrated,” Mladjov wrote, in a comment on TechCrunch. “Not to mention that we did this without millions of dollars from VC’s (you need to combine the total of funding all the Suite2 companies) and with a fraction of the developers or the time it took them. In fact, we showed this to Intel Capital last year and they turned us down. Intel was not impressed that we were not from Stanford or Harvard and that we were only two guys (and 10 + developers).”

Do I detect a hint of class warfare in Silicon Valley?

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Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

http://www.enterpriseweb2.com

In fact, Andrew McAfee’s original article on Enterprise 2.0 was borne from observing what was happening in one of our customers and projecting into the future. Well, future happens fast.

Looking back, look what I blogged just before the first Web 2.0 conference:

I’m providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with Socialtext Customer Mike Pusateri from Disney. You might recall his great presentation at the at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Confererence in February. Mike and his team are leading the way with how they are using lightweight web-native tools as a platform for productivity. Not just how they use Socialtext for project communication, but how they stitch it together Moveable Type and Newsgator for an ecosystem of tools with RSS.

That was then, this is now. I provided a workship on Enterprise 2.0.

Tuesday we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel. Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee’s vision of Enterprise 2.0. In a box. Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises. Extensible because we’ve all supported open APIs. Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations. SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, McAfee went further to distinguish this Network IT (NIT) from Functional IT and Enterprise IT:

As the DrKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:

Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DrKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.

Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DrKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.

Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DrKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use.

…Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a pageasking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know….I have to [tell them], I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or Everyone’s assignments are on this page-use the same page to report on progress.’”

Lead users and enterprises already work this way today. Only they do so without usable efficiency. Integrated single sign-on, search and tag cloud are just the beginning. One click subscription to a page, blog post, search query, report, weblog and wiki make feeds usable (unlike today’s user experience, when they click on an orange icon and think their browser is broken). Rapidly form groups, draft together on a wiki page, publish to a blog and track results.

Beyond making such tasks efficient, the benefits to productivity, discovering emergent intelligence and high-engagement marketing are significant. Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging. With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing — something will emerge. She recognizes the opportunity, pulls on the social fabric and easily forms a diverse group of experts. They follow new feeds and generates others while working with a little productive friction. They develop a plan and draft a new offering in the wiki. They publish to a public blog and track where it goes. The feedback loops continue, she goes home for the day and the organization is bound to adapt again.

This isn’t your Dad’s enterprise, but one you will be working with soon.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

One could almost preface the SuiteTwo announcement from the Web 2.0 Summit with a Sesame Street-like “this has been brought to you by the letter S.” Just look at the companies involved:

SimpleFeed
Socialtext
SpikeSource
Six Apart
Newsgator

Like I said, “almost.” One of these things is not like the other, etc.

All of these companies have Intel Capital in common as a contact point, bringing them together to create SuiteTwo. Each provides software stemming from their area of expertise. This means enterprise strength wikis, news aggregation, RSS feed creation and distribution, blogging, and a platform to integrate them all comes in a single hardware appliance.

Mark Carlson, CEO of SimpleFeed, said in a phone call from the Summit that Intel’s global sales channels plan to target small- and medium-sized businesses with SuiteTwo. He quipped that, for Intel, “$500 million is a medium-sized business.”

Carlson told me their involvement with SuiteTwo began with a shadowy call from Intel last winter, to gauge his firm’s interest in the project. Through May and June, the project jelled into the SuiteTwo concept as the different companies continued talks and development through the summer.

“The last few weeks have been frantic,” Carlson said, with some relief evident in his voice.

Sales should begin in the first quarter of 2007. The launch price had been a secret (and is subject to change), but according to Carlson someone blurted out it would be $175 per user for SuiteTwo.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.