Enterprise 2.0 and the Debate about Technology and Control

Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, makes a number of excellent points in his article Enterprise 2.0, SoA and the Freeform Advantage. His article explores the potential debate about the issues of technology and control:

If there is debate, it will be on two fronts: the role of organizational identities (Egalitarian) or an emphasis on technology over social dynamics.

He quotes Andrew McAfee on the second point:

Programmers could build fully-functional wikis, blogs, tagging systems, and prediction markets by carving them out of solid COBOL and serving them through the first Netscape browser. They'd be clunky, but they'd work. And I bet they'd draw users, too, because they'd tap into our desire to use technology to interact with each other, and also tap into the good stuff that emerges when we do so.

I agree completely with this point. I think Web 2.0 has a lot more to do with concepts like emergence and self-organization than it does with a snapshot of the current technology in vogue.

And he makes a strong statement of his own on the first point, which I endorse:

Every sacrifice made for sake of control reduces network effects, assumes a static environment you can design against and is designed by supposed experts outside the context of use. Contrary to the most disruptive pattern of social software -- sharing control creates value.

While I agree with his primary points I would argue with certain aspects of his examples.

I don’t think the mere existence of granular access control is the cause of the problem. I think the real problem, as he pointed out is the model where a supposed expert exerts control outside the context of use. But for example, I think freely mixing single author and multi-author wiki pages increases the opportunity to leverage the advantages of a wiki without causing the problem of inappropriate control. Allowing authors to create a “single author” page that’s not open for edits is not the same thing as exerting control outside the context of use.

Examples of single author content that’s often shared in a wiki include:

• A press release
• A letter from the CEO
• Pricing information
• Explicit operational instructions from a customer or partner

I would also make the same point about simple workflow and templates. Workflow and templates can be used for control and they will have the negative impacts he suggests but they can also be used to simplify user contribution. For example, it’s extremely common for a new wiki user to copy an existing article and then edit it as a way to get started. Giving that user both the option of a blank page and a choice of templates to start from increases their freedom and ability to contribute. A good example of positive structure is wikiHow and we’ll certainly see more such prominent examples in the future.

Below are some examples of how I think workflow and templates can increase user contribution and emergent behavior

• Question and answer workflow as the basis for a new wiki page
• Simple workflow such as the “draft mode” concept which can encourage people to contribute partial ideas that they explicitly want help with
• Providing optional templates and forms to help people with new articles

To me the core wiki principles that Ward Cunningham outlined such as Open, Incremental, Organic, Observable, etc. are still prescient and provide valuable guidelines as wikis gain prominence within the Enterprise. Those original principles provide some very specific guidelines but they don’t prescribe the features or technologies that are appropriate to support those principles.