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.

Fourth in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

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.

Related WIOWA Questions:

4.a Support to People (support to effectiveness)

Do you know which people are involved in your same projects?

4.b Teaming (organizational services)

In your team, are individuals plans often compatible with the group activity?

4.c Collaboration (knowledge and collaborative support)

Is it usual to participate to other group projects?

4.d Communication (communication and socialization)

Is it usual to discuss with others about their work, solving problems together?

We don’t know whether the president has ever personally used a wiki, but his staff at the White House Office of Management and Budget uses one.

Washington Post columnist Stephen Barr explores how the OMB is using a wiki to track earmarks in the federal budget. Earmarking is a process by which members of Congress designate money for specific projects, often in their home states or congressional districts.

With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB.

That’s a great example of the improvement in efficiency that a wiki can bring.

The budget wiki is not as freewheeling as Wikipedia, the sometimes-controversial online encyclopedia. It is the government, after all. For security, federal officials have to ask permission to join; it is not open to the public or Congress.

And a good example of how a wiki fits into the existing landscape of an organization. Security and Permissions are there, and it’s not an open playground for the public. What’s more, it gives people inside OMB a way to work more closely and make better informed decisions that take multiple viewpoints into account:

Karen Evans, who oversees government-wide technology policy at the OMB, views wikis as a way to provide an opportunity “where everybody gets a say” that then leads to “a very informed decision” by officials.

The wiki permits budget officials to work in real time with one another, rather than sort through e-mail chains wending through the government. It allows officials to hold online meetings when time is short or bad weather makes in-person meetings difficult to schedule. It is open around the clock, so federal budget officials may post comments from home at night or on weekends.

This is good for greater communication, handling issues that come up at odd hours faster, and enabling government to work more efficiently.

Then there’s the networking factor. The wiki features a directory of users, with their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, an important feature in a government where people transfer among agencies or take different jobs every few years.

A WikiCharter is a set of guidelines to ensure productive interaction between members of your wiki community. Here are five guidelines from the Sony Ericsson Developer World wiki:

Clay Shirky’s new book is out today: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations It’s on Amazon, and it looks really good.

If you’re in Cambridge, MA, Clay is speaking about the book at the Berkman Center at Harvard tonight:

“Here Comes Everybody” is about the social changes coming as a result of the internet’s power to support group action. Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action; all of these forms of group effort have been hampered by the myriad real-world difficulties of finding and coordinating with others. Our new group-forming media have removed many of those difficulties, and we are in the middle of a transformation of all kinds of group action.

More info on the Berkman Center Events & Webcasts blog.

Tim Karr, Director of SavetheInternet.com wrote to me about a new bill introduced in Congress this week that would guarantee Net Neutrality by restoring it in the foundation of communications law. Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (HR 5353) to stop relentless corporate attempts to set up roadblocks on the information superhighway.

The new bill requires the FCC to actively protect the free-flowing Internet from gatekeepers, enforcing protections that “guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators based upon its source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.”

I’ve written before about Net Neutrality:

• time to blog about Net Neutrality
• Help make Net Neutrality a law in 2007
• Blogger call tomorrow on internet blocking and Net Neutrality

It’s an issue I feel strongly about, and you should too. The success of the Internet is a direct result of its openness and lack of hierarchy and preferential treatment for any group of users. It needs to stay that way to continue reshaping how we interact. Click here for a quick form to contact your representatives in Congress and ask them to support HR5353.

Please vote. It’s the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family, your friends, your country, and your world. You have the power, and together, We can make change happen. Yes. we. can.

Dave Atkins of Westwood, Masachusetts wrote last week to tell me about a post he’s written on Using a Wiki to Improve Town Governance. Many people aren’t involved in their local governments because there are too many barriers to participation. Dave’s description of the barriers gets right to the heart of it: [Read more]

Beth Simone Noveck, Director of the Peer to Patent Project, has written an article on Wiki Government for Democracy Journal.

She opens with that line above above, from George Bernard Shaw. It’s powerful, and it was said all the way back in 1911¹. Now that’s not saying that professions are inherently bad, or that they shouldn’t exist. It’s really suggesting that lay people have just as much to offer as experts. [Read more]

Rogers Cadenhead writes about the Long Bet Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz (of the New York Times) made back in 2002: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.” Cadenhead looks at the ranking for Times articles and blogs on the top five stories, as ranked by the Associated Press, and finds that in three out of five the blog ranked higher.

But the real winner: Wikipedia. It ranks higher than the Times on four out of five. Cadenhead sums it up this way:

“Winer predicted a news environment “changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.” Nisenholtz expected the professional media to remain the authoritative source for “unbiased, accurate, and coherent” information.

Instead, our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover.”

That’s a cheap shot. (maybe it was meant to be humorous, but it sure comes off as a cheap shot).

Here’s a commenter’s take:

“Wiki’s are closer to on-line libraries while blogs and media portals are like Daily newspapers… the news rolls off the front page and into oblivion. So, unless there’s been an amzingly popluar news event with a limit number of sources then the wiki will quickly rise to the top of a search since the Wiki has more permanence and is discovered and referenced more often than a blog or new portal.”

That’s much better.