Collaboration Quiz

by Patti Anklam

April 5, 2008 at 9:20 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

Colleagues Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk from Anecdote, along with Nancy White have pleased a teaser on the Anecdote site about their work-in-progress on collaboration. They offer a quick quiz on collaboration capability.

[Update: The full paper Building a Collaborate Workplace is now available.]

They have made a useful distinction about three types of collaboration: team, community, and network, which enables them to offer a quiz with yes/no answers in these three categories. I like the quiz and I like the distinctions even more, as they actually offer an historical perspective on collaboration.

Teams (a defined set of people working on a focused deliverable), and the importance of teams to workplace performance. Our workplaces were full of books on teams, training, and team metaphors.
Communities (in which the boundaries are more loosely defined and there are more likely to be shared learning goals rather than fixed deliverables). We became conscious of communities and working with communities in the mid90s, as the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger spread through the knowledge management community.
Networks (undefined and unbounded groups of people who contribute to and draw from the value produced by the network as a whole). We are still in the early stages of understanding and harnessing networks in organizations.

Tools have evolved — or made possible — each of these levels. Project management tools for teams, collaboration software for communities, and Web/E2.0 capabilities for networks. Here’s one of the network questions from the quiz:

People can recount stories of where they have found information from someone else’s book-marks, blogs or wikis that made a significant contribution to their work. True/False?

Funny, we couldn’t even have asked this question a year ago.

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5 Comments »

[...] types of collaboration post with a quiz to see just how social your organisational culture is, in both the collaborative (directed) and emergent collective (volunteered) [...]

I like those categories for collaboration except for me those three are quite blurred. Someone who is on my team may also be a part of my community and loosely connected through a network. Knowing where a person sits and how the person moves from one place to another (from the network to the community for example) can be difficult to understand.

Shiv, you voiced my reaction to reading the teams, communities and networks definitions too, only for different reasons. When Joe Cothrel and I conducted our “Online Communities in Business 2004″ study http://www.sageway.com/ocib.html , one of the intriguing outcomes for me was seeing how people categorized their interests in ways I never imagined.

Respondents were asked to choose from which perspective they were responding to our survey: team, community or network. I was amazed at how differently a number of people I knew chose to respond compared to how I assumed they would describe their interest.

No doubt it’s a dynamic and complex world of multiple group memberships and identities with people moving in and out of groups officially and unofficially to get work done based on business drivers and project needs.

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