I know, I know, it’s been 3 months and 12 days and some hours since my last post. I know I told you all that I would deliver four weekly analyses on the subjects of misconceptions of collaboration. But the reality was that I overestimated the work required to accomplish this feat.
Between then and now, I have produced a methodology for managing virtual collaboration, and I’ve applied it to a couple projects. It isn’t perfect, but I’m reminded by a good friend, that in the field of Web 2.0, there are no experts, only degrees of amateur.
So instead of focusing on the negative aspects of my original series, I’m proposing on highlighting the positive steps that I have found to ensure successful projects.
These are the ones that I have focused on. My goal is to share my findings with you, so let’s get started.
Communities are projects
That’s right; I said projects, not communities. This is the biggest revelation that I could have stumbled on this year. We have to stop treating all collaborations like communities, and focus on the reason for their existence. Some might exist to bring people of different stripes under a big tent to discuss common interest, but others strive to achieve a specific goal, product, or conclusion.
So instead of looking at it from a community management perspective, we should be focusing our energies on the project management aspect of these endeavors. For us to achieve a goal, we must identify a plan on how to get there.
For example:
If your goal is to determine the diverging opinions that exist around a certain policy;
Your plan may be as simple as finding 5 friends, and asking them over coffee. Or it may be complex as having 20 policy experts, having specific discussions through an organized schedule of weekly exercises.
Both have the same outcome, but require a different methodology to achieve that outcome. The effort is less when dealing with easy tasks versus complex ones. Gathering 5 friends and asking them a question is simple. Engaging 20 policy experts might be too complex to manage alone.
This brings me to my Next post:
Foundations make for better buildings
2 comments:
"We have to stop treating all collaborations like communities, and focus on the reason for their existence."
I 100% agree with that statement. It's not always necessary to engage a community in order to attack a collaborative project. And not all projects need to form or maintain a community. (Even further to that, there are some communities which can't be managed. I'd suggest that #w2p is such a community.)
Although I'm not sure that I agree with your statement "So instead of looking at it from a community management perspective, we should be focusing our energies on the project management aspect..."
I'm not so sure it's an either-or argument. I think it's a "when it's appropriate" argument. Sometimes it will be necessary to focus on community management. I'm channeling my International Institutions course at the moment, thinking that communities can operate like an institution. It provides a platform, a space, where cooperation can happen, where information is shared, where action can be facilitated. It won't always be necessary to tap into a particular community, but there may be cases where it is necessary.
I'd suggest that collaboration requires many things. Project management is crucial. Communities are also a component, but the two are not mutually exclusive.
I wouldn't necessarily think communities are projects.
When communities operate on the basis of task completion or "what can this bring for me", the actual dynamic is weakened and the community fails.
Communities need long-term nurture. Projects have a deadline by definition and deliverables. I think we're talking mostly qualitative measurement with respect to community, while projects can have a more quantitative aspect.
These are my thoughts based on the experiences I've had over the past year working with a broad community that tackles different projects, and requires different levels of attention, relationship-building, need fulfillment, etc..
:)
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