The integrated focus on content and personal interaction in traditional collaboration is changing to a more bifurcated focus in a Web 2.0 environment where sharing content and personal interaction can exist separately. This has ramifications in terms of what are appropriate actions to support collaboration in a Web 2.0 environment.
This is learning that I have arrived at based on an idea set out by Lilia Efimova in her blog which in turn quotes Nancy White's discussion of this idea. The idea as expressed by Lilia and Nancy is that interaction in a Web 2.0 environment can be broken down into information relationships and human relationships.
I have been writing for a while in this blog about how traditional collaboration can migrate over to a Web 2.0 environment and how it can be supported in that environment. In my thinking, I knew some things could remain the same and other things would have to be different. What these "things" are and how they can be different remains a topic of interest for me.
What Lilia and Nancy made clear is that in a Web 2.0 environment, interaction among people can just be about information. They call this an "information relationship." There can also be a "human relationship" which I take to mean our usual interactions among people. I think that this also applies to collaboration. We can have collaboration in the world of Web 2.0 which is just about information and not "human relationships." Many of the often cited examples like Wikipedia and Linux appear to be about these information relationships.
The two types of relationships are reflected in the following chart.
INFORMATION RELATIONSHIP HUMAN RELATIONSHIP
Trusting the source. Trusting the person.
Enthusiasm for the topic. Enthusiasm for the person.
Sharing knowledge with the other. Sharing myself with the other.
Explicit knowledge of the topic. Tacit knowledge of the person.
Typical vehicles: Blogs, wikis. Typical vehicles: In-person, phone
Key dilemma: Choosing whether Key dilemma: Choosing whether to
to go from an information to share more of yourself with the
human relationship. other.
In the past, our interaction in teams has been seen as an integrated interaction of sharing both information with one another and appropriately sharing oneself with each other, i.e. being warm, open, vulnerable or "human." There have been, in the past, programs like T-groups, team building and communication workshops that were built on the premise that we need to be effective in both sharing information with each other and also improving our human interaction skills. Engineers have often been taken to task for being too much into just dealing with data and HR people for being too much into dealing with feelings. Underlying this is the assumption that we all exist on one single continuum which ranges from sharing information to sharing feelings. The optimum postulated was someone who balanced doing both at the same time or who could manage this ongoing balance. Improving human interaction was also seen as a key lever to improving the flow of information.
In the current Web 2.0 environment, this continuum and its assumptions may no longer apply. The Web 2.0 environment enables us to just be about sharing information with one another in an information relationship. As Lilia and Nancy point out, this information relationship entails having meaningful interaction about topics and trust in what others are producing while not engaging on a personal level. Competency is seen as being adept at sharing information effectively.
We can also be in human relationships. This can continue to be about engagement with the personalities of each other and giving time and attention to the relationship. Of course, one can still be about doing both in an integrated way as in the past.
The importance of this new way of looking at things is that one realizes that the old tools and interventions used in collaboration may no longer be appropriate to interactions in the Web 2.0 world where those interactions are just about information. We may no longer need to concern ourselves with the human interaction element nor strive to create competencies in this area as we did in the past. We do need to build trust in each other as trusted resources for knowledge.
One issue is how far do we need to go in building effective human interaction when the relationship is an information relationship. At what point could this information relationship be undermined because of dysfunctionality or lack of competency in human interaction? And, what about interactions on Facebook or Twitter? Are these media just for carrying out information relationships or are they places where human relationships are required? Finally, what about integrated platforms that use blogs, wikis, social networking, and microblogging? Do these require the reintegration of the bifurcated relationship?
What do you think? Please join with me in exploring this.
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