Active and passive collaboration
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)?
moses lew said,
active – higher levels of disinformation such as blogs, “a lot of information” = a lot of disinformation. as it is published by people who might not necessary be the subject matter experts.
passive – a state of highly dependable information, but most channels are still placing a price on such forms of information because they carry weight and solves a targeted problem.
honestly, passive or active does not matter. what i feel needs to be explored is the motivation behind each person’s contribution of information. align the motivations and develop quick and easy channels for them to collaborate.
people naturally group together based on motivations. an example might be “if u love bicycles, you need to check out this website” and when a person logs into the website and finds people who share similar motivations, they subtly start contributing and following (which then, RSS feeds become relevant).
hence, we can tell that motivation is important, and hence, if u wanna know if active or passive is more effective, explore the motivation.
when u are sick, you are motivated to get well faster, and hence, a passive collaboration is more effective. however, when you are motivated by a certain sport / movie star, you will find every bit of juicy information on every other blog about it.
my two cents =)
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