Lots of people contribute to Wikipedia, creating a lot of useful articles. Lots of people post photos on Flickr or movies on Youtube. It seems like everyone is using these hot new tools to create all sorts of user-generated content. So why aren’t these social media/web 2.0 things more prevalent in the office? Maybe in your office everyone contributes to some central wiki, but my experience is the opposite. Oh sure, when the idea comes up everyone thinks it is a good idea. So the tech guy gets it up and running, announces it to the crowd, and nothing happens — what is up?
In Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations he discusses the imbalance of contribution in collaborative production. It turns out the a relatively few people create/maintain most of the Wikipedia articles, more people make few changes, and the great majority don’t contribute anything. This works for Wikipedia, where everyone works for free, and partipants mostly don’t know each other. But translate this to the workplace, and imagine a team of 8 where 2 people do 80% of the work, 4 others do 5% each and the 2 remaining watch them do it. Seems a little unfair, doesn’t it?
Looking back at the languishing workplace wikis and the like, it is easier to see what happens. The wiki gets created and a couple of eager people jump in and create some articles. And then sit back to see what their fellows will do — but they don’t do anything. So the eager people think that no one wants to contribute and give up. Perhaps what needs to be recognized is that these technologies work with exactly this type of imbalance. Don’t expect the work to be evenly distrubted — it won’t be. Make sure the team knows this will happen. Find some way to reward or recognize the 20% who will do 80% of the work. Maybe give those big contributors release from other tasks. And don’t assume that just because everyone isn’t contributing that the resource has no value.
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he discusses the imbalance of contribution in collaborative production. It turns out the a relatively few people create/maintain most of the Wikipedia articles, more people make few changes, and the great majority don’t contribute anything. This works for Wikipedia, where everyone works for free, and partipants mostly don’t know each other. But translate this to the workplace, and imagine a team of 8 where 2 people do 80% of the work, 4 others do 5% each and the 2 remaining watch them do it. Seems a little unfair, doesn’t it?