On Contribution
I’ll admit that I had a difficult time coming up with something to blog about with this week’s topic. In all honesty, my initial reaction was, “Of course collaboration is important and benefits information professionals!” but after reflecting a bit more I realized that my own experiences with collaboration have been variable, some were great and some were less than great.
Collaboration depends on involvement and contribution, and my best experiences with collaborative projects were when everyone was pitching in for a common goal, held themselves responsible for completing that goal, and held themselves responsible for their own contributions. I don’t wish to go into detail about my experiences when a collaborative project hadn’t gone well [and don’t worry group, I believe that our course Wiki completely rocked and was a great example of good collaboration!] but I would like to discuss what has been problematic for some of my collaborative projects in the past.
In my experience, collaboration hasn’t worked well when the goal of the project is not clear for everyone involved. Or, when the goal is understood, sometimes because of various factors (work, other classes, life, etc.) people aren’t able to contribute as much as others, and this is of course understandable and unavoidable. Other times, I’ve found collaborative projects to be complicated by distance or misunderstandings via online interactions, which might have been remedied by setting aside some face-to-face or voice-to-voice communications, which with distance collaborators can be difficult or near impossible. Lastly, the most frustrating complications with collaboration for me have been when I’ve found myself in the sole leadership/director position rather than in a position to share leadership responsibilities with everyone. This last aspect has only happened on a couple of occasions, but have been at times when others’ contributions were minimal.
Collaboration on projects works best when everyone is present, available, and ready, willing, and interested in contributing. Social media can support good collaboration and can help peers or colleagues in various locations and time zones to construct virtual or online objects. But I think that for collaboration to work well among people there needs to be trust, responsibility, concise communication, self-motivation, self-direction, empathy, a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, a willingness to ask important or clarifying questions, and an ability to stay positive and keep the common goals, purpose, mission, values, etc. in mind.
It also helps when people are really happy to be there and happy to contribute. In a past life, I was a manager at a coffee house for 5 years and it was far easier to get people to help out with planning for a party or a fun event than it was to get them to complete a cleaning project or restock the inventory. If people care about the goal, mission, or values of a project they are far more likely to fully contribute or go beyond the minimal tasks.
On Context
I do think that collaboration depends on context to a certain extent, especially in online and virtual spaces. To give a personal example, back in 2009/2010 I contributed to a collaborative research development project. Basically, the idea of the project was to move the process of researching and gathering historical information to an online environment. The stages of the research process were initially formulated as: initial notes, cross listed files on persons, places, events, or organizations, and the final published product which was a collection of biographies, summaries, and detailed information entries in monograph form. The project got as far as an initial online prototype that was a cross between a wiki and a database.
What was most interesting about assisting with the design of this collaborative space was the levels of publicness or privacy that would be permitted. The historian I was working with stressed that everything must be kept in a private space, with only permitted members, and that the only content that might be viewable by the public would be the final, well researched and publishable entries. This comes to my point, that what is permissible and acceptable as collaboration depends on context. In this case, an open Wikipedia-like collaboration space was unacceptable, and publicly available social media was out of the question. Collaboration was only acceptable in a private online space among fellow colleagues, researchers, and research assistants, and not viewable or accessible to others.
On Clay Shirky
Lastly, I’d like to share some thoughts on Clay Shirky’s TED Talk video, Institutions versus Collaboration. In this 2005 video, Shirky compares and contrasts the institutional model of project management and the collaborative model that is possible with social media technologies. One of Shirky’s points is that, to a certain extent, collaborative spaces erode the traditional institutional model. Being that it is now 2011, I was wondering how relevant these points are today, and came across this article, Social Media versus Institutions discussing the same ideas in 2009. It seems then, that some organizations and institutions are still trying to make sense of networked collaboration and how to make it work in what was traditionally hierarchical and modular environments.
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