Here’s the dire assessment: Your association is becoming more irrelevant by the moment if it isn’t participating in the conversation made possible by social media. Signs of the paradigm shift are all around us and quite obvious. Association leaders who don’t recognize the signs are either uninformed or unconscious.
In order to shift from the culture of individual work to the culture of collaborative work, it is obvious that the issue of trust is crucial: trust is linked not only with the Wiki spirit but it is a very important requirement of creativity and so of the orientation to innovation.
To be considered a credible expert is important such as to be sure to have reliable expert’s opinions; the feeling that you are appreciate inside your team and more in general in your community is an incentive to be active and “creative”.
I believe this very strongly, and I think it’s one of the most critical cultural changes that will determine which organizations thrive and which ones lose relevance.
Bill Ives echoes this point in his summary of J.P. Rangaswami’s presentation at the FASTForward ’08 conference. Rengaswami talked of the “new polarization” in organizations, or how the customer gains control.
The fights have traditionally been within the IT departments. Now they have moved outside.
The first polarization is expertise. People of his and my generation believe experience is necessary for real innovation. We need to stop rejecting youth.
The second is participation. Now people can participate in much more than possible. He gave as an example, the numerous donations in small amounts that Obama has raised for the US primary campaign through the web on his way to a record month for total contributions ever.
The third dimension is time. He quoted Rupert Murdoch that fast is the new good. Now we have stuff in Beta all the time. JP said that IT has to get over these three concepts to succeed. Now the users have already breached the IT wall and running around inside the fort. It is too late to keep them out.
Strictly linked with transparency concept, openness is at the base of the principle that people work better if they have access to the right information and possibility to assume that all over the organization.
The simple access to other group member data or the possibility to know activities scheduled also in other groups are normal operations in a mature context such as is allowed to look to other team solutions or results in order to decide something for the own team.
A common element between Wiki philosophy and innovation successful case histories, is the partial or total absence of structure or, saying better, of hierarchy. The possibility, in fact, to contribute in the same way, indifferently at which level you are involved in the organization, is one of the first steps towards the reduction of barriers to collaboration, participation and involvement in the organizational life.
Peering is to intend in the two ways of organizational commitment: from both the perspective, the access to common information and the possibility to contribute to corporate knowledge.
The social networking aspect is the starting point of a company sensible to Enterprise 2.0 – then Wiki – solutions. Introducing this concept in a workplace context is possible to change in a radical and effective way the previous organizational culture.
The first step to stimulate social networking is to allow the creation of personal spaces – if possible with an internal blog – and then to produce a staff list in order to let people know who their colleagues are and which are personal skills that they own. In this way there will be a simpler identification of experts.
The WikiSym 2008 Call for Papers is available now. WikiSym will be held 8-10 September in Porto, Portugal!
WikiFest – 6:00 talks
WikiFest is a new addition this year. It’s devoted to helping you start and grow a successful wiki, and I’ve structured it Pecha Kucha style which means max 6 minutes and 20 slides – get to the point, do it fast, and hear from as many people as possible! [Read more]
You’ll just have to watch the video to find out! Sam and Dennis Howlett discussed the differences between online communities and internal collaboration, and it’s well worth watching:
The true collaboration occurs when people have the possibility to co-work on the same sub-task, activating a mechanism of new knowledge creation. Collaboration is not so obvious if is not clearly supported: the risk is to exchange this “together” learning process with a simple cooperation process, producing not new knowledge but only a simple addition of individual regress knowledge.
In this sense, collaboration has to be helped in order to avoid isolation in job and supported with a compatible scheduling of daily activities. Is also important to create “collaboration bridges” across teams and groups, involving people to participate in each other’s activities or involve experts on other areas to collaborate together.
Michael Idinopolous suggests 3 ways to build a participatory knowledgebase using a wiki:
1. Structure by Topic
The whole point of the wiki is its ability to bring people together and connect dots across organizational silos. That won’t happen if you structure the wiki around those very silos.
Here, he argues the wiki shouldn’t mimic the existing organizational structure because that won’t help break down information silos.
I agree with the principle of using the wiki to encourage new connections across the organization, but it does need to start with some resemblance of the existing organizational structure. That gives people confidence in using it. [Read more]