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.
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:
Funny, we couldn’t even have asked this question a year ago.
[...] 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.
[...] http://steve-dale.net/?p=181 http://curtisconley.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1 http://www.theappgap.com/collaboration-quiz.html http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/A-Z+of+social+media [...]
The full paper in which this quiz appears is now available on the anecdote site.
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Be sure to catch Bill Ives' ongoing review series in which he looks at online, sharable database apps. The focus of Bill's reviews: web-based business software that enables companies and individuals to better organize, track, and share information, as well as better manage projects, processes and workflows.
Among the Web-based tools he's reviewed: Zoho, QuickBase, and TrackVia.

Or, if you’d like to get all the tips now, click here to request a copy of the white paper – “7 Ways to Optimize Project Team Productivity: Using Customizable Web-based Software to Your Business Advantage.”.
The AppGap has hosted a series of discussions with leading thinkers and doers intended to illuminate how new apps and approaches are changing the way we work and help companies and individuals implement better collaboration, project management, and productivity practices and solutions. Access, via the links below, the recordings, each about an hour long, of the discussions.
- 5 Big Ideas for Getting All That Work Done
- Should Your Business be Friends with Facebook
- The Future of Work
Need help in getting organized? Want to keep things from falling through the cracks? Check out this free and simple to use online "To-Do List" called Intuit Task Manager, offered by our sponsor Intuit QuickBase. Sign-up is easy so you can get started with it right away.

Intuit's QuickBase, the sponsor of this blog, has just been named an Editor's Choice by PC Mag. Check out the review which calls QuickBase a "a surprisingly simple and elegant application."
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