03 Apr 09 Turning work into play – Collaboration is not a myth
I recently had an interesting discussion with Darren following his cry “Collaboration is a myth” as he tried to find real world examples of collaboration. he framed the question in an interesting way, “What motivates people on Wikipedia to do stuff in concert like that. What is the essence of what we call collaboration?”
At first I thought it came down to two things, user stake in the objective, and user effort required for contribution. These must be balanced against each other. the lower the effort for contribution, the less that needs to be at stake for collaboration participation.
Darren then mused if you could achieve collaboration for business processes, where the user stake in a larger company can be exceptionally minimal.
“Can the gap be bridged purely by technology? - a technology which truly brought collaboration to the workplace”
At first, I thought no, if effort is required and user stake largely removed, can technology bridge the gap to achieve any kind of collaborative work. But then I remembered a great talk from TED,
that showed us that in fact there are times when we will very willingly do something for nothing. that is when we are at play.
there are actually already examples of this type of collaboration in the real world – here are two:
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
and
