A few weeks ago, Kyle and I got wind of an interesting conference taking place in San Francisto. Put on by GigaOm, the conference was called “Net:Work 2010: The Future of Work.”  The premise is roughly this: that the emergence of the cloud, combined with the ubiquity of laptops, smart phones and always-on broadband has allowed millions(?) of workers to do their thing anywhere. Some companies have embraced this. But for the most part, it’s the workers on the fringes who are leading the charge. So, the question is whether (and how) companies will come along. What combination of tech, people and policies will enable a virtual, anytime, anywhere work culture?

What follows are some quick highlights – essentially my reconstituted notes – from the conference. I’d certainly recommend GigaOm’s own recaps of the event, starting with Simon Mackie’s recap and then this directory of live blog coverage.

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One of the first noteworthy statistics we heard is that the average mobile worker is 46 years old and lives outside Silicon Valley. This is underscores the need to better understand workers and the scenarios

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In a discussion about how and why people adopt new technology, Sameer Patel, managing director of The Sovos Group used the example of his mother, who when he left India didn’t have computer. Two years later she was happily Skyping. The lesson: people (and employees) won’t and shouldn’t be expected to adopt technology for its own sake. Adoption, however, will naturally follow if new technology offers benefits that end-users can clearly see for themselves.

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Sococo software that gives a virtual company a Second Life type environment in which its workers can collaborate, IM and Web conference. Essentially, what you see is the floor plan of a metaphorical office with many different rooms that have different purposes. And you can choose what room you want to hang out in. It feels like a heavy metaphor, but I suspect that this (and perhaps other metaphors) might be just the crutch that is needed in order for some teams to transition to the cloud.

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Allen Delattre, Global Mng Dir, Technology Practice for Korn/Ferry was the first to call out what became a recurring theme at the conference: that moving to the cloud was no longer a technological issue, but a leadership issue. How do leaders effectively manage and motivate a dispersed and virtual work team?

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One of the highlights for me was a chat with John Seely Brown and John Hagel, from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge. I wasn’t familiar with their concept of the “edge” but it appears they’ve built a whole consulting practice around it. They talked about how in the past companies have tried to innovate by bringing the edge into the center (i.e., developing new tech and then institutionalizing it). They propose that it might make more sense nowadays to try to bring the center out to the edge. One example of this would be a “reverse mentorship,” in which, say, the CEO would be paired with a 20-something who has more access to (and naturally makes more use of) so-called “power tools” than people within the core of the org!

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Some folks were making the case for the “mobilocracy”. Evan Caplan, CEO of iPass said that according to a study they did of 2.5 million users, mobile workers put in 240 more hours per year.

He also discussed what his company refers to as the “device stack,” which is the triumvirate of the laptop, pad and smartphone. The thinking is that this threesome will become the standard mobile worker arsenal in pretty short order. The relationship between each of these items will be come an important consideration for solution designers.

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Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff discussed their new Chatter social collaboration product. In the process, he dropped some neologisms, including “chatterlytics” and “chatterati” (how he refers to heavy Chatter users within the company).

He suggested the very real possibility that future compensation could be based one’s internal social standing (e.g., an internal Klout score).

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Another great term somebody used to describe the mobile worker lifestyle: “live/work arbitrage.”

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Now, the main reason we went to the conference wasn’t to hear about software, but to attend a panel on coworking, which featured owners from New Work City, PariSoma and NextSpace, as well as the founder of Loosecubes, a web site that lets you find an open meeting or work space anywhere in the world.

What became clear in the panel discussion is that coworking is growing up. It has served independent workers and entrepreneurs very well, but the panelists agreed that coworking might be relevant to a larger audience and to bigger organizations.

There definitely is a lot of curiosity about coworking from bigger organizations and people who don’t necessarily work in coworking spaces but are champions of entrepreneurship and innovation. Om Malik himself  has been a vocal proponent of coworking (which is evidenced by inclusion of a coworking breakout at his otherwise tech-oriented conference).

Of course, the verdict is out on how the burgeoning coworking movement will intersect the trend of worker mobilit and cloud computing, but we are optimistic that some future incarnation of the “office” will have its roots in the humble coworking space.

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Creative commons photo credit: rsmith179