Collaboration: A Vision for Content Managment

Reading interview with Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of Socialtext, found in ‘Wikinomics’ by Tapscott and Williams...

‘One of a growing number of start-ups that have emerged to supply social computing technologies (especially wikis) to enterprises.’

‘”For a long time,” says Mayfield, “personal productivity tools and applications – the kind that Microsoft makes – have been centred on a single user who generates documents. You also have highly structured enterprise systems designed and implemented from the top down – in many ways as an instrument of control – with rigid work flow, business rules, and ontologies that users must fit themselves into. The problem is that users don’t like using those kinds of tools, and what they end up doing is trying to circumvent them. That’s why ninety percent of collaboration exists in emails.”’

‘Mayfield argues that traditional organizations have reached a point where e-mail itself is breaking. “You could argue that ten or twenty percent of e-mail is productive”.’

‘Mayfield thinks the solution is collaboration tools that adapt to the habits of workplace teams and social networks rather than the other way around.’

So, in similar way to envisaged genealogy software, each employee is represented by an XML or Web page object. FOAF or similar networks can be created and used as required to provide information about how the employees relate to each other, without prescribing a hierarchy of any kind.

A modern Content Management System (CMS) should provide the facility for each employee to create blogs, wiki articles etc. In the same way that they expect be able to use Social Networking software when at home. The difference being that these activities are only posted to an internal intranet, (unless required by the employee to link to some public facility like Wikipedia).

Concerning Mayfield’s comment about spam... I think, it may be better to employ a twitter style stream – admittedly 80% may be irrelevant, but it would enable workers to know what each is doing. I would also build in an ‘ignore hashtag’ function though, as I don’t necessarily want to know about every conversation – or even ‘block hashtag’. (I need to find this function within twitter!)

And, oh yes, of course I think that we can apply the same system to genealogy.

1. Tapscott, D. & Williams, A., 2008. Wikinomics, Atlantic Books.