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Is this really collaboration?
Tuesday, September 11, 2007 by admin
As part of a report I am writing on collaboration, I have been mulling over the increasingly broad use of the words “collaboration” and “collaborative”, and wondering how appropriate they are in certain contexts. Let me explain.
“Collaboration” literally means “to work together”. As I see it, this necessarily implies that the parties involved are conscious of their co-involvement in the activity.
However, increasingly the term “collaborative” is being used to describe tools where the central value is gained by the participation of a collection of users – but where the individual users’ contribution is not made in the name of the collective – it is made for their own personal benefit. For example, users of social bookmarking systems may tag pages for their own reference or to help them find things again – not explicitly to add to the broader network of tagged content. But, since there is no explicit intention to participate in the collective activity, surely this cannot truly be collaboration? Just because there is a collective benefit from multiple people using the same system, doesn’t mean the people involved shared the same goal.
It may be that the term collaboration is simply the best-fitting umbrella for these tools and methods, but with all the confusion in the market over what is meant by collaboration – especially with terms such as Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0 etc adding to the mix – I think we need to be more careful about how we describe emerging social software and services.
Posted in Collaboration
3 Responses to Is this really collaboration?
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Simply put, if the tools don’t enable people to work at the same time on the same version of the truth then they aren’t collaborative. Sun’s Netbeans suite has proper collaboration pieces, Google Docs is properly collaborative and using X Emacs and firing up the same information on multiple machines was also collaborative.
This isn’t a new thing, but unfortunately its a term being applied to technologies that aren’t really any better than RCS or CVS, they are just sync points with a pretty GUI.
Hello mate,
I think you’re right to see a difference. I think the tools where the central value is gained from the participation of a group of individuals who are essentially doing something for themselves are better described as “social” tools rather than “collaborative” tools.
Social tools might encourage collaboration – MySpace for example would go into my “Social” bucket as I don’t think it’s a collaborative tool per se (Facebook is much much more geared towards collaboration I reckon) – Shared whiteboards, Wikis, Google Docs on the other hand belong in Collaborative…
G.
Thanks for the comments folks.
Gary – I think the social/collaboration contrast is a good one, and it also to some extent solves the problem of vendors all wanting to be seen as hip and current!