Active and passive collaboration

Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 25 February, 2011 under Collaboration |
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I am proposing that there are two kinds of collaboration. Active and passive.

Active collaboration refers to people actively going to a portal or a tool to contribute and share information willingly about new ideas, products and help others. Passive on the other hand is where people would only collaborate if they were asked to – answer the question and collaboration stops as well (unless there is a follow up question)

Active collaboration
There is an inherent problem with this which is called information overload. When an active community is out there contributing and sharing stuff, there is alot of information flowing around. With a busy schedule, some of the right people to respond to the right information can be missed. Active collaboration relies on people to correctly and effectively identify the information that is relevant to them and respond accordingly. Some may argue that there is RSS, notification and stuff like that to help with this problem. However if there are multiple workspaces for different teams with different focus and currently natural language business intelligence hasn’t been effectively developed yet, there will surely be information that is missed out.

Passive collaboration
Passive collaboration on the other hand is seeking help on a specific problem with a specific person or group of people. It is targeted, focused, short and sweet. With our busy schedule, we do not have time to go through a ton of non relevant information. However, the issue with this is to identify the right person or groups of people that can help with the problem. For passive collaboration to work, all that is required is to have a up to date directory of employees and every employee’s skills are listed and maybe even rated against a capability maturity matrix. Employees can then search on the database for potentially right person or team to answer a specific quesiton and a response is mandatory – even if the answer is “Sorry I am not sure”.

What do you think? Would passive collaboration work better? What the pros and cons for each of the different types of collaboration? Where is active collaboration more useful than passive (and vice versa)?

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