Emergent collaboration Archives - Leading Virtually

Leading Virtual Communities: Do We Have the Answers?

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:21:19 +0000

The WSJ published an interesting article on Monday (September 29, 2008) about Preston Fosback, a 16-year old, who engaged people all over the world to monitor, via the Internet, the Obama-Biden sign outside his front yard to make sure it wasn’t stolen. The people who monitor the sign essentially form a virtual community or a virtual group who are unlikely to ever meet. They are monitoring without entering into any kind of transaction with Preston Fosback or with each other. Yet, they have come together to carry out an activity in a way that would make any firm’s team leaders proud.

In this post, I cover:

Virtual communities on the Internet,
Things we know about leading virtual communities, and
Things we don’t know about leading virtual communities.

Virtual communities on the Internet

The article “In Sign of the Times, Global Village Gathers to Watch a Sign” describes how Preston Fosback asked for help watching the Obama-Biden sign in his front yard after two previous signs had been stolen. Fosback trained a video-camera, placed inside his house, on the sign and streamed the video via Ustream.tv. Within days hundreds of people, some from as far away as Australia, Sri Lanka, and Japan, were watching the video and participating in a chat that runs next to the video. According to the article, “Dozens of viewers now take shifts, based on their time zones, so as not to leave the sign unwatched at any time.” The viewers have given a name to their community, CHAOS or Citizens Hanging Around the Obama Sign, and are not only protective of the sign but also of the Fosbacks. They have even named the things in the video, including the rocks and the ceramic gnome near the signs. Some have offered to start a college fund for Fosback.

Today, much like Fosback, progressive business leaders are tapping into virtual communities of customers and interested people outside their immediate proximity or their company to carry out product design, creation, marketing, and maintenance. This phenomenon goes by several names, each representing a different nuance of stakeholder engagement, such as crowdsourcing, peer-production, and co-creation. However, business leaders don’t have much guidance that would help them lead such endeavors. What I want to do in the rest of this post is to identify the ideas I could glean from the article about leading virtual communities and then raise questions that virtual team leaders might ask about leading virtual communities. I hope this post is an opportunity for readers of this blog to join in and contribute on this nascent topic.

Things we know about leading virtual communities

A few ideas about engaging people via the Internet are clear from the article. First, there was an easy technology solution in the form Ustream.tv that made it possible for Fosback to develop a virtual group. Second, Fosback was willing to take the risk of seeing his plan fail. Third, he made the intent of his activity very clear (see the box ‘About Obama Sign CCTV 1’ here). Fourth, the viewers (participants in the virtual group) identified with what the sign stood for. They participated for instrinsic reasons, not for any extrinsic rewards, in exchange for their ‘monitoring’ services. Indeed, one viewer sees protecting the sign as protecting freedom of speech.

Things we don’t know about leading virtual communities

The article also stimulates questions that business leaders would like the answers to in order to better lead a crowdsourcing, peer-production, or co-creation activity. The questions that come to my mind are:

How do we know that others would find an activity to be intrinsically motivating?
How do we connect with others who are likely to find an activity to be intrinsically motivating?
How do we increase the likelihood of a “viral” spread in participation in the activity?
How do we ensure that participation remains within acceptable boundaries? (the article provides a brief example in which Fosback stopped the viewers from trashing his friend, Ben, when Ben appeared on the chat and Fosback introduced him as a McCain supporter.)
What type of leadership should a business leader display in such communities?

What answers do you have to these questions? Are there other questions that business leaders interested in crowdsourcing, peer-production, or co-creation want answered? Or is it that we cannot do much except hang out a shingle on the Internet and hope that others would come and engage in an activity, much like I am trying to engage you?

The post Leading Virtual Communities: Do We Have the Answers? appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Emergent Collaboration: The Reason Why Email Should Not Be Used for Collaboration

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:55:27 +0000

In one of her recent posts, Betsy Carroll blogged about alternatives to email. Email tends to be misused because of its accessibility and convenience. People end up using it in situations where alternatives would be more suitable. While stressing that email is great for communication but not for collaboration, Betsy discussed alternatives to email and the situations where they would be more suitable. I want to extend her blog post by focusing on emergent collaboration, which I believe is going to be a significant way in which organizations will collaborate (or will need to collaborate) going forward. The idea of emergent collaboration is relevant to our blog because emergent collaboration relies on virtual groups or teams getting formed and accomplishing a task on the fly.

I will discuss the following in this post:

What is emergent collaboration?
Why is emergent collaboration relevant to businesses today?
What facilitates emergent collaboration?
Tools for emergent collaboration; specifically, why blogs and wikis are more suitable than email for emergent collaboration.

What is emergent collaboration?

The best way to learn about emergent collaboration is through an example. Visit the initial part of a Harvard Business Review article titled “Collaboration Rules” to get an idea of emergent collaboration. The example under the heading “Tuesday, December 2, 2003” illustrates the emergence of collaboration among individuals after a systems administrator at a university discovered a hacker attack on his university’s server and traced it to rsync, a synchronization tool for Unix/Linux machines. As you read through the example, you will notice a few things. While the goal of collaboration was known from the beginning, there was no prior determination of who the collaborators will be or the collaboration process itself. Nor was there a leader who guided the whole process. The collaboration evolved from a single person’s problem and relevant individuals were engaged when their expertise was needed. The next steps were determined just prior to their execution, taking into account whatever that had happened till then. In a nutshell, emergent collaboration is organic; while the goal of collaboration may be known, there is no prior determination of who the collaborators will be or of the collaboration process. Also, in emergent collaboration, the involvement of individuals and the collaboration processes are adaptive in that they evolve in response to the situation at any point of time. There is no one in particular who directs the whole process as it evolves.

Why is emergent collaboration relevant?

Today, businesses are facing greater uncertainty and complexity. Competition is emerging from industries and regions of the world that were not competing before (e.g., cable companies are now competing with telephone companies). Due to the Internet, business stakeholders (e.g., customers) have a louder and a far-reaching voice. Consequently, issues that any businesses need to address are emerging from unexpected quarters and with greater uncertainty. How can businesses respond to such pressures? When faced with a highly complex issue, a business needs to make sure that it enables collaboration among individuals who can cover the many different aspects of the issue. However, due to the uncertainty with which the business issues arise, it is not possible for a business to plan beforehand who should collaborate and how. Nor is it possible for a business to develop a clear idea of how the collaboration should evolve once an issue is right in front of it. Relevant collaboration will have to emerge on its own and at the right time to enable an effective response. The key thing that a business will have to do is to make sure that it puts into place a system that enables emergent collaboration.

What facilitates emergent collaboration?

An important requirement for emergent collaboration is a shared workspace that is accessible to all collaborators. Ideally, this workspace should include all the important transactions that have taken place among business workers. In addition to helping a group of collaborators learn from past transactions and take the best step forward, such a workspace facilitates stigmergy, i.e., it enables a worker’s contribution to stimulate others to build on that contribution without any direct communication between the workers. Stigmergy facilitates emergent collaboration by not requiring a single person or a leader with a top level view to coordinate the actions of others. According to Francis Heylighen, an example of stigmergy is seen in the Open Source community when a contributor uploads a piece of code to a community site. This posting invites examination from others interested in using that code. If they discover any problems with the software, they either fix the problem themselves or alert the community about the problem, thereby encouraging others to work on the problem. There is no direct communication from one worker to another – the openness or accessibility of all the critical actions by community members enables work to be coordinated among “undesignated” community members who, at a particular moment, happen to have the resources (time and capability) needed to advance the community’s work.

In addition to a shared and open workspace, emergent collaboration requires meta-level information that highlights the significance of the transactions that are occurring or have occurred within a group of collaborators. Since many workers may be making their contributions at any point in time, which of these many contributions should other members be focusing on and building on at that time? How should they prioritize their effort? Meta-level information that indicates the significance of transactions within a group can help a group determine which issues it should tackle first and which contributions should be given more weight than others.

Tools for emergent collaboration

The above discussion provides reasons for why businesses should move away from email as a platform for collaboration. To respond to increasing uncertainty and complexity, businesses will have to put into place systems that facilitate emergent collaboration. Email is not likely to facilitate emergent collaboration. It does not provide a shared and open workspace, nor does it provide the meta-level information I refer to above – at least not without loading it up with additional tools.

On the other hand, blogs and wikis, two prominent Web 2.0 tools, provide the shared and open workspace needed for emergent collaboration. They can also be set up to provide the meta-level information needed to facilitate emergent collaboration. Specifically, blogs and wikis have the linking and tagging features which make them suitable for generating the meta-level information that indicates the significance of transactions among a group of workers. You can see examples of this meta-level information by visiting Wikipedia and clicking on Special pages under toolbox on the left. Under Special pages, you will see a variety of links, many of which provide meta-level information about the Wikipedia community. For instance, New Pages and Recent Changes tell you what the community members are most interested in now; “Pages with the most revisions” indicate what is popular and/or controversial; “Most linked-to pages” show you the ideas or topics that have had the most impact on the community. In a blogging system, a tag cloud indicates the relative popularity of different topics among bloggers. Linking among bloggers indicates who carries weight for a particular topic. With the help of such meta-level information, blogs and wikis can facilitate emergent collaboration among a group of workers by helping them determine if there are topics or events that need their attention and if there is anybody in particular who should be engaged for addressing those topics or events.

A brief example of the usefulness of blogs and wikis for emergent collaboration can be seen in a New York Times article titled Open Source Spying. In this article, which discusses the use of blogs and wikis by US Intelligence Agencies to counter the threat posed by terrorists, the author gives the following example of how Intellipedia, a wiki used by US Intelligence agencies, enabled emergent collaboration in the Fall of 2006:

…the usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist act.

In this post, I have briefly touched upon some of the things that are required for emergent collaboration. Besides the right technology, one needs the right mix of leadership, culture, rewards, and policies for emergent collaboration to occur. It is certainly a challenge for a business to figure of what this right mix is and we hope to cover more on this topic in our future posts. What makes it even more challenging for a business to create conditions that facilitate emergent collaboration is that it also needs to enable structured or planned collaboration along with emergent collaboration. How a business can put into place a system that enables both structured and emergent collaboration is still a wide open question with no simple answer.

The post Emergent Collaboration: The Reason Why Email Should Not Be Used for Collaboration appeared first on Leading Virtually.