Atlassian Helps Children Read

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Atlassian announced today the Atlassian Stimulus Package, a discounted offer on two of it’s most popular products, Confluence and JIRA. This offer is intended to benefit three different parties: Atlassian, small workgroups using these products, and children in developing countries.

Here are the details of Atlassian’s package, which features the number 5. For the next five days, teams of up to five users may purchase an annual license to either Confluence or JIRA for $5. Atlassian says that these are fully functional versions of the software, not “light” versions. In addition, the license is renewable annually for the same amount and includes support from Atlassian.

Atlassian stands to gain from this promotion, of course. The company should add many new subscribers to its products as a result of this offer. Their hope is that the small teams using Atlassian software will influence others within their organization, leading to additional purchases at full price.

Small workgroups of up to five people also benefit from this deal, because they can purchase proven collaboration tools at a huge discount and continue to use the software at an extremely low annual cost.

The real winner from the Atlassian Stimulus Package is impoverished children around the world. Atlassian will donate 100% of the proceeds from this promotion to Room to Read, a charity that builds libraries for children in developing countries. Atlassian’s goal is to donate $25,000 to Room to Read, as a result of selling $5,000 in discounted Confluence and JIRA licenses on each of the next five days. More kids will have books to read — or learn to read in the first place — as a result of Atlassian’s and Room to Read’s joint effort.

Hats off to Atlassian for crafting a marketing promotion that not only sells software, but also benefits less fortunate children around the world!  If you are part of a small workgroup that could benefit from using a wiki or issue tracking tool to support your activities, please consider Atlassian’s offer.

Valuing Social Connections

A team of researchers from International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released a very interesting piece of academic research this week, which presents some findings from a study of “the largest organizational social network ever collected.”  The researchers collected and mined data related to c. 400,000 IBM employees.  The researchers further focused on a subset of that dataset — 2,600 consultants — to draw insights on how connectedness impacts the productivity of employees who generate revenues by logging billable hours.

What makes the study so interesting — in addition to the extraordinarily huge dataset used — is that it is one of the first attempts I’ve seen to assign a currency-based value to social network connections.  In this case, the social network is based in email; it lives in IBM’s internal deployment of Lotus Notes.

The study associates incremental revenue earned by a consultant with both individual and project-level email activity.  For example, the study finds that if an IBM consultant uses email to reach out to a manager that is not his direct supervisor, he produces, on average, an additional $588/month in revenue as compared to a consultant that only interfaces with her direct manager.

This is fascinating stuff, and my head is spinning with the possibilities of how this might be applied to inter-enterprise interactions conducted via emergent social software, rather than through well-institutionalized email.  I just came across this study today and haven’t had time to properly digest it yet, but will do so and comment further.  In the meanwhile, I invite you to read it for yourself and leave observations and  comments here.