I’ve been discussing yesterday with the great, yet sober, Nicolas Vanbremeersch aka Versac who runs SpinTank on engaging organisations with their “customers”
He drew a very simple graph to explain me his understanding of the topic
1- mixes individual and collaboration.It is a configuration where people, with no particular expertise or status, join together to form a community and exchange with their voices, ideas and egos on a specific topic to create content out of user generated content.2 – mixes individual and expertise.It is a configuration where people, with specific knowledge and/or expertise and/or experience, communicate with others to deliver and share their view.3 – mixes group and expertise.It is a configuration where people, with specific knowledge and/or expertise and/or experience, communicate with others to form a community and exchange with their voices, ideas and egos on a specific topic to create content out of user generated content. 4 – mixes group and collaboration.It is a configuration where people, with no particular expertise or status, join together to form a community on a specific topic to create content out of user generated content
I found it powerful for analysising what is being done in the social web but also what we do here, on a daily basis, at HeadShift: - The collaboration expertise scale basically is about what people are looking for and aiming at.- The individual group scale basically is about what is the main focus of participants
Obviously different perspectives mean different functionalities and features, mean different technology (ies).1 – is a social network with features favouring personal uses, voices and egos.People can blog, load their images, videos, songs and manage and display their own network (buddy-list). Facebook is right on the dot these days.At HeadShift we have developed MotorAddicts, a social network with rich-features for people passionate about tuning and motor racing, for a specific client. One lesson we have learned is that behaviours and habits that emerge are true ones. And this, when you own the system and access to stats and reports, is excellent to understand/experiment relevant ways of communicating and marketing toward a specific community (of stake-holders, particularly consumers) but also innovate or improves products and services.2 – is a personal space of expression.People will traditionally blog to deliver a message, using mainly text, images, videos as media. The person has been in a position to have her voice heard because of her specific specific position in a specific environment. The message is contextual and powerful because it benefits from peculiar attention the event/situation/position provides. This builds reputation. CEO, Expert and Consulting blogging fall into that category.At HeadShift we have developed the Davos Forum blog for the General Secretary of Amnesty International, Ms Irene Khan.3 – is a collective space of expression on a determined topic.People will exchange information and ideas in a way that each personal view will add to the overall content in a way that creates coherence. Traditional media (newspapers) and business associations naturally fall into that category. The value is twofold:- For authors as (1) they gain visibility and potentially reputation and as (2) it creates a distributed source of intelligence and brainstorming opportunity.- For readers who find a relevant source of information for various purposes.At HeadShift we have had developed Patient Opinion for the NHS. NHS patients can share their info while the NHS can learn straight from the horse’s mouth and improve their processes.4 – is a collective space of expression with non particular topics.Reality shows that the dynamic of the community generates consensus on emerging topics. That is a sedimentation or auto-organisation process. Collaboration in/among team(s) for innovation or emergent co-design are part of that. The OpenSource movement followed that path, particularly with SourceForge.At HeadShift, we have designed those emergent processes based on an interfaced and user-friendly mix of blogs, wikis, social-bookmark and feeds in many internal applications to spark innovation or enrich existing processes
Now there is an additional layer that one often miss: governance. Governance is how you manage the articulation of the one and the many. If markets have to be regarded “as conversations” (as the 2.0 paradigm pretends), governance is a key element to be taken into consideration.Experience shows that one shall not converse the same way in the four subparts. The different mix of technologies, set of tools and functionalities available to people who participate in the conversation only are the result of the governance.If we go back to the simple model Versac’s draw me yesterday to sustain our conversation and integrate governance we obtain
1 – RepublicanAs a conversation it is a dialogue among people; the one speaks to the many and everyone is THE one. During the conversation some people appear to be more relevant and gain reputation. Their blogs are massively read, they are a source of reference. These ones are more connected (buddies, feeds, trackbacks) and generate more conversation. This emerging process is the process we traditionally refer to as meritocracy. Blogosphere as a whole fits into that model.2 – MonarchicAs a conversation it is a monologue; the one say something, the many listen and eventually make comments. The one blogs, the many read and they eventually leave comments. It where the top-down approach is the purest. 3 – AristocraticAs a conversation it is a dialogue among peers; fee ones say something, the rest listens and eventually comments. It is regularly used by professional organisations that display their expertise to the rest of the community. They traditionally are excellent and up-to-date source of specialised or specific information. The difference with the Republican model is that the members are experts a priori; they are experts well before the conversation starts, there is no emergence.4 – DemocraticDemocratic is to be understood in the neo-roman way of Free State. The conversation is many to many and from there some elements get collective approval and become a step stone, either cultural or organisational. It is where the bottom-up, grass-root approach is the purest.
Of course, reality is often more complex than this representation.- We see emerging communities on the web that mix different models (see Obiwi for instance).- The projects we’ve been working for at HeadShift were never that grassroots, because we always have been working with existing organisations (we facilitate Enterprise 2.0 since 02!). Hence the voluntary void I left in the second graph. Drupal is a good model of Free State because it worked that way from scratch
However, governance regularly is the black-hole of any effort to engage with stake-holders. Managers are used to refer to sociological paradigms when they question organisational processes but seldom use the powerful political paradigms. In doing so they miss quite a lot of relevant elements, simply because management also (I would say primarily) means managing PEOPLE.One won’t engage the same way in an Aristocratic world or in a Democratic one. Yet organisations hardly consider that perspective, they usually stick to the command-and-control model that is either Monarchic or Aristocratic. And that is the main reason why organisations fail in adopting Enterprise 2.0, fail in engaging with customers, employees and their remaining stake-holders. Even Corporate Social Responsibility often suffers from that. Governance is key, business models only are the way how to make money out of that (financially en
gage conversations), business processes only are the way how to make things work efficiently (operationally engage conversations).Political science has drawn over the centuries useful keys to engage properly NOW. It’s high time to dig into this vault to engage meaningful conversations and take organisations to a next level: more engaged, more relevant, more efficient. At HeadShift we say smarter > simpler > social. Organisations that have understood that build a key competitive advantage for their future.