Yesterday I lamented in a Tweet: “Is the collaboration word overused? Sometimes it really is just communication, or even just presence-ing. And that is OK.” Then in a Twitter connection moment, Thomas Vander Wal (@vanderwal) pointed me to his recent blog post Getting to Know Collective and Collaborative and Jack Vinson (@jackvinson) similarly pointed both of us to his earlier Just what do you mean by ‘collaboration’. Both gents nailed exactly what I’ve been feeling.
Jack’s post, in turn, pointed to Shawn Callahan’s Collaboration’s Resurgence, which provides historical context for what I was observing…both a legitimate increased need for collaboration, along with the unfortunate increased abuse of the word as if to mean any interaction involving more than one person.
For me, it isn’t collaboration unless we are working on a common deliverable or problem, all party’s inputs effect the result, and we have the opportunity and expectation to influence each other during the creative process. In this regard the use of blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking, RSS, and email are rarely truly collaborative. Even wiki, the most collaborative tool of the new lot, often reverts back to just self-publishing…not because of limited permissions, but because the page is published as if it were final and nobody cares or dares to edit it.
The AIIM Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0, Figure 8, p.27, identifies “increase collaboration” as the respondents number one objective for enterprise 2.0. I wonder what those who answered in this fashion really meant and how they intend to use web 2.0 tools (beyond wiki, which I ‘get’) to accomplish collaboration? Perhaps what they really meant was increased visibility, interaction, connections, and shared meaning; i.e. an increase in social capital, which in turn can facilitate productive collaboration…including the old-fashioned kind of, for example, getting on the real or virtual white-board together to thrash out the next breakthrough idea.
Further Reading:
- Richard Watson’s Collaboration: I don’t believe in it that brings in the collaboration definition from Wikinomics
- Chris Fletcher’s What’s up with collaboration? noting an up-tick in the talk about collaboration, although this time in the postive.
- Elizabeth Marsh’s Collaboration, from the ground up that takes on some of the cultural aspects of collaboration
The use of twitter in social networks has increased collaboration on different issues than ever before. However there are others who disagree on the collaborative effect. There is another issue of flow as stoweboyd describes how he is able to make his point across. Tweeting can be challenging as most of the top tweeters spend most of the time behind the computer screen. It can also sometimes be addictive and takes away human interaction. There are other who discuss its effect at the workplace. Tweets or Blogs – A Personal Perspective
You’ve certainly nailed the issue. Even in the Deloite’s recently released “Change your world or the world will change you – The future of Collaborative Government and Web 2.0″ the word collaboration is used quite generically.