Climbing Levels Of Collaboration
•
5 likes•2,210 views
The document discusses levels of collaboration, from simply sharing information to more advanced cooperation and crowdsourcing. It focuses on using wikis to enable simultaneous editing and give customers a voice. Wikis can encourage collaboration and scalability but may not be suitable for every purpose. Motivating community contributions through reputation, reciprocity, attachment and efficiency is explored.
![My Story ,[object Object],[object Object]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (13)
Similar to Climbing Levels Of Collaboration
Similar to Climbing Levels Of Collaboration (20)
More from Anne Gentle
More from Anne Gentle (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Climbing Levels Of Collaboration
- 1. Climbing the Levels of Collaboration Or, How to Harness the Power of Crowds (or your Coworkers) Anne Gentle STC Webinar, September 2009
Editor's Notes
- Groups can take action even quicker than ever before in history thanks to tools that amplify group communications such as wikis, blogs, and instant messaging. There are three distinct levels of collaboration that a group can attain and what they accomplish directly correlates to the level of collaboration. 1 Information sharing - this hands-on example would be just finding out information as any technical writer does, via email, phone calls, interviews, etc. 2 Cooperating - this hands-on example would borrow from Agile techniques to help shape a web application and online help going with it, more like a "we're all working at a startup in someone's garage." 3 Collaborating - this hands-on example would demonstrate how a Book Sprint is run with subject matter experts identified and working together to create an information deliverable, with FLOSS Manuals' wiki platform as an example.
- Author of the book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation I’ve had a lot of interesting collaborative authoring experiences plus I’m embedded on an Agile team and I’d like to share. Michael Cote challenged me to find good end user doc wiki
- These are the classics of collaboration. Follow the rules. Be on time. Be professional. Share. Offer candy or chocolate. Interesting side note – more submissions to STC Intercom about “how to get info from SMEs” than any other unsolicited article topic. We know how to do this part. Exercise – design a transportation device Transport people between 1 and 10 miles per hour Stop on demand Carry at least one person Restrain at least one person (so they don’t fall out) Look nice Now imagine if I told you: Work alone! Don’t look at your neighbor’s paper! No collaboration! No talking! You’d each have a nice drawing at the end of a five minute period. Now, if I had you gather back together into workgroups, and you took the braking system from one design, the propulsion system from another design, and the restraints and aesthetics from another design, what would you get?
- Agile development practices – Communication tools borrowed from the gaming industry offers voice interaction Video conferences Creating “ball points” example – went from 1 “ball point” to 5 to 50 due to iterations and learning from experience plus being willing to experiment Define crowdsourcing: delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without monetary compensation Iterations involve retrospectives – what went well? What would you change? (photo is a Bog oak floor in Denmark) What are some of these collaborative tools? Wikis are one. Other methods involve getting to know each other and your readers. Social bookmarking – show Wordle Social networking - Facebook, LinkedIn (search LinkedIn for your product’s name)
- Wiki is a website that uses wiki software, allowing the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked (often databased) Web pages. Based on permissions, users can edit pages Basic code is either wikitext (ascii based markup language) or HTML code - A wiki allows a group of people to collaboratively develop a Web site with no knowledge of HTML or other markup languages. Anyone can add to or edit pages Not just Wikipedia, your enterprise wiki is not Wikipedia
- Enables simultaneous edits Give customer a voice and view point Living, breathing, changing documentation
- Crowdsourcing is the term for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. Twitter mosaic
- eBay wiki, now defunct, originally said their goal is to reduce support phone calls Open source wants open documentation Apache wiki, One Laptop per Child wiki, FLOSS Manuals free documentation for free software
- from Wiki for Dummies Don’t go on wiki suicide missions Wikis don’t have magical powers. They cannot create camaraderie where none exists, nor can they streamline an out-of-control operation. They are not powerful information magnets, nor will they make your team better writers, more organized, or more intelligent. In short, without a strong guiding hand, wikis are useless. starting a wiki was in reality just a procrastination attempt—put off the real work of collaborating and cooperating with each other by distracting yourself with wiki engine research and selection and installation
- What will your customers receive in return for their contribution? Borrow a point system from your customer support forums, perhaps? Points can be traded in for t-shirts or registrations to user group meetings or conferences.
- Efficacy Reciprocity Reciprocity Reputation Reputation
- First and foremost: Build a sense of community Adaptations on a theme - comments, wikislices, internal wikis Online forums Feedback from customers always looping to your source files Listen: Search.twitter.com for product name Blogsearch.google.com, search for product name Infoslicer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0UDRi37MWM
- OLPC chose a wiki as an open source solution to offering information to developer volunteers initially, but end-users also need documentation in their wiki. Mediawiki and Floss Manuals, which runs on TWiki. wiki.laptop.org contains all information about the XO laptop, but FLOSS Manuals contains targeted information for certain audiences. The structured nature of the wiki would let us re-use content for different audiences such as kids, parents, school admins, or teachers. Since they started with it from the beginning, the only changes I observed were my own learning and building of mental models for the use of wikis for information storage. Looking at WikiPatterns.com, which patterns or anti-patterns are in place? The Invitation pattern is a nicely done people pattern. They also have a nice Starting point on the OLPC wiki. And Welcoming is definitely a part of their best practices, even though it’s very difficult for them to keep up with the interest in volunteering. Have you done anything to encourage one pattern or squash out an anti-pattern? I know there have been acts of Vandalism on people’s talk pages, but those just get reversed immediately by a very on-their-toes administrator. I guess the act was in retaliation for an answer someone gave in an FAQ. I also see a little bit of ThreadMess going on with some development-oriented pages.
- The original Book Sprint was invented by Tomas Krag, who wanted to get his friends together to write a book for wireless networking in the developing world. He thought he’d buy a stack of plane tickets, get everyone together to figure out the book’s outline, then send everyone home to write. What was unexpected is how much they got done just while in the same room together.