Everyday life

Having just started using a potential platform (open source) for our collaborative networking efforts, I find it hard to get some involvement going. The reason is, I think, just as simple as the reason for writing here. An event, or in this case the lack of an expected event, triggered my imagination and the need to share that in writing. In other words I needed to be moved, called, addressed, remembered, et cetera, to write this article. I also needed to find the inspiration and resulting energy to actually start writing.

Coming from a brief stint in e-learning and knowledge management, I always thought that a system that facilitates choosing the right subject combined with delivering the right content would be enough for people to gather around, use and add on to. My mistake! In the beginning the subjects where forced (top-down) upon the masses and if you don’t give people a vote, you give them a veto!

Our bottom up approach and giving them a vote does not take off as expected either. We provided a group of people a choice of subjects, the sub-group choosing ours, we provided with content, books, presentations, links, we even provided the means to add whatever the group wants to itself. In direct interaction with the group, there is energy, enthusiasm and drive, maybe not enough focus and own initiative, but the first is a matter of experience and if the experience is a happy one, own initiative will follow. By the way, if that is naïve, let me know! The result is that there is some activity, but most still happens outside our environment.

The lesson learned so far is that any system that facilitates collaboration not only needs to be bootstrapped (which we did!), it has to be kept going by creating events that are interesting and motivate people to make the next step (which we are apparently having trouble with). An interesting subject and the right content is clearly not enough to keep things going.

Is it the system, is it the group using it, are we not providing enough triggers/events to make the network self sustaining? We are still doing research and looking for the answer, but I have a sneaky feeling that the way we behave in everyday life (chaotic and triggered by the events occurring around us) is what we will have to emulate until the network becomes self sustaining. This means that any system supporting collaboration in networks will have to offer the means to create many different events and will have to provide a wide array of services and the mechanisms needed to choose the matching service. Different groups may well use different services to cover the same event! In other words, it needs to emulate the non-linear way we interact with each other and our surroundings. Looks suspiciously like everyday life.