Thoughts, ideas, pointers, and comments on Online Collaboration. Please post new information on top, blog-style.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 team objectives

 

Uses for wiki

 

from Many to Many

 

INATT by Andrew McAfee

It's Not Not About the Technology

Enterprise 2.0

 

What to do about lack of f2f...WSJ

 

Community

Communities of practice have gathered lots of press. As they should. What a dream: a self-sustaining group of professionals who maintain and advance their standards and nurture newcomers into their ranks. However, most groups or teams are not communities of practice. They are people who common bond is getting a job done.

 

Learning & Working For years, I've said that for a knowledge worker, learning and working are the same thing. Now I have a few doubts. It's possible to work without learning. Learning has many meanings. Consider:   learning where the bathroom is located learning algebra learning tennis learning to play poker learning to dance learning to speak French learning to cook learning to be a chef learning to write learning to be an author   Work comes in many flavors, too. People collaborate to:   agree on practices reflect on successes and failures diagnose problems/bottlenecks explore new ground resolve conflicts influence decisions coordinate work steps serve cusotmers better take advantage of multiple perspectives

 

Is web2.0 for you or your organisation?   You should consider ...   You want to express the human voice of your organization You want to enable easy ways for people to share knowledge and information Open source thinking - you are willing to share ideas in progress and let others join in and help it You want to enable many voices Can deal with the messiness You already have the basics covered The tools/strategies can help you realise your intended outcomes   Forget it if ...   You are obsessively controllling If your organization is not ready for some changes in how you work Your audience is not online Everything must be vetted by central authority Your copy or campaign messaging is written in stone, not electricity

 

 

Blurb describing the Supernova discussion on our topic:

 

Workplace Web Issues

Since the soul of this conference is the web and the business world, I thought I’d get a great sense for that from “The New Enterprise Disorder Roundtable,” which asked the question: “How do organizations apply order and structure when users are influencing the new corporate culture?” From its description, it doesn’t really sound like this discussion would be about Web 2.0, but ultimately that was the focus.

 

The panel was led by Nextpage CTO Tom Ngo, and included Mark Bergman, CTO of Symantec; Brian Kellner, general manager of RSS reader company NewsGator; Amy Wohl of Wohl Associates; Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce.com, and David Weinberger, author and fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

 

The main theme that emerged from this conversation between business leaders and tech experts is that the tech support people in organizations are to blame for squelching the opportunities for businesses to grow through the use of innovative web applications. While employees might appear to be unproductive as they spend work time on Facebook or Twitter, some of the people on this panel — mostly upper management types — implied that businesses might learn from their more web-savvy employees. One example given was from a tech leader whose blog-addicted employee had found Dell’s product road map online, something that Dell probably wouldn’t want leaked, but might prove beneficial to other companies and help them be competitive.

So why don’t companies let employees use more social media and web applications? Because, said Wohl and others, IT people want complete and total control of what is happening on their network, lest they be held accountable for any unexpected havoc that might ensue. For that reason, what employees are able to access during work hours is restricted and any unauthorized activity is quickly reprimanded.

 

Panelists said that management is unable to harness the knowledge and connectedness of its web-savvy employees for the good of the business. Often, it’s because they aren’t aware of these skills. Ngo asked, “How would I know that I have this Twitter-addicted person on my team, and that this person could have great ideas for the business because she is so ‘in the know’?”

 

The problem is that most businesses come from a hierarchical top-down tradition. If Sara uses Twitter all day but works in the lower ranks, it’s unlikely that the business-beneficial ideas she derives from using social networking tools are likely to make its way up to management. And even if it they did, would anyone believe her?

 

The conclusion of the panel was that businesses need to be more open to social networking, and have more open local networks to allow their employees to access the web tools that make their lives easier, to the ultimate benefit of the business. But I doubt the age-old problem of bosses not listening to employees will be solved with that, and the conversation seemed futile to me, especially because this kind of “disruption” is far from new.

Online teams rarely thrive without following some core practices. For example, the successful wikis I've participated in all had a gardener to trim unruly branches and move things around when they seem out of place. Members of successful online teams share information with one another for the good of the group. They periodically take time to reflect on their progress and their process.

 

 

 

Patterns for effective collaborative teamwork

Sociology is more important than tools.

Articulate problem statement.

All members of the team commit to participation and sharing for the good of the group and attainment of its goals. Buy-in. Membership. One for all and all for one.

Adopt common naming conventions.

Define operating conventions. (Such as when iterations occur, conducting retrospective analysis before moving forward.)

Team is committed to continuous improvement.

Transparency for team members.

Don’t forget the emotional component: people must feel others care.

Assign an architect to structure tools and practices, a facilitator to keep team members enthused and on track, and a gardener to prune, replant, and compost to keep the workspace tidy.

 

 

Noted by Beth Kanter: Community Curator: The final entrepreneurship example is to build a community. While not directly creating a product, by providing the impetus for people to come together you can create opportunities for monetization. Whether it is incorporating appropriate affiliate advertising or facilitating transactions between members, this is probably one of the most difficult and time-consuming projects to pull off. However, if done successfully, it can be the most rewarding. Sites like Ning.com simplify the software setup for your social network. All that’s left is creating a site that’s sticky; a place where what’s shared is valuable and worth coming back to again and again.

 

 

 

“Nancy “Snow” White: Seven Competencies of Online Interaction”

 

Nancy's Jobs of the Present:

The difficult thing is that organizations are still unlikely to invest in people to do community organizing, building, nurturing and facilitating beyond those businesses who are in the online community business.

 

Why?

 

I could venture a few guesses. "Community" is still a soft squishy word. Sometimes community is the WRONG word! Our ability to understand the tangible benefits of our groups and communities is spotty at best. But most of all, I think there is a continuing unrealistic expectation that if you put up interaction software, things will just happen in your organization.

 

Cisco research

Cisco research Virtual communication 'best practices' recommended in the report include agreeing to protocols on response times, and establishing rules for the selection of media and the frequency of communications, especially in multi-cultural teams. Encouraging socialising and ad-hoc chats over a virtual 'coffee machine' by using spontaneous and richer media for communications can also speed up the development of trust.

 

Loretta Donovan offers:

• Seek and Support Boundary Spanners

 By virtue of nature, experience, skill or other characteristics, Boundary Spanners have and make lots of connections outside their ordinary formal assigned roles. Their relationships can be instrumental in weaving social ties within a new online community. Intentionally including Boundary Spanners as about 15% of a new group will serve as a catalyst to their relationship building, and at the same time increase the capacity of the group to reach out beyond its initial boundaries to attract more "second degree" connections and more to make the interaction richer in perspectives and interaction.

 

NETWORKS, CONNECTIONS AND COMMUNITY: LEARNING WITH SOCIAL SOFTWARE, Australian Flexible Learning

 

Ken Thompson, The Bumble Bee, Virtual Team Profiler

Bioteams

 

anecdote on collaborationLaunch     Heuristics John Smith and Bev Trayner   Design for learning using CPD model is productive Spending time on social processes Using different media to negotiate language as part of a larger process Creating new possibilities: subgroups and outside experts as resources Demonstrating leadership roles in different media Provoking shifts in "comfort zones."

 

 

 

 

 

 

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