Edge of Network

The most interesting piece we learned while analyzing the attendance of on-line communities of practice is that the virtual collaboration has nicely defined segments. At this point, I see three major segments of virtual collaboration:

• A network – a collaboration within tightly knit group of people. This segment is characterized by high bandwidth of interaction; not just in terms of bits per second, but rather the ability to have rich interactions in person. The group is usually cohesive, has shared symbols, and good amount of trust between group members. The group is able to tune its technology over time to be compatible with each other to the maximum possible extent, and train themselves in using this technology in similar ways. For example, employees within an organization all share the same version of desktop software, have VPNs between offices, often meet in person and share the culture and the context of the company and its mission and objectives.
• Random individuals – The other end of the spectrum is the exact opposite of the network. An individual might want to connect to another individual in a very specific context. People don’t necessarily know each other in advance, and the interaction is usually short-lived and transaction oriented. Say, people discussing a bid on eBay, or a few individuals debating a blog post through comments. Or a group of bloggers having a “conversation” through mutual linking on their own blogs. I tend to believe that interactions on on-line dating sites or social networking sites are also form of a virtual collaboration, and would fall into this segment.
• Edge of Network is a hybrid of the above. A small group of insiders collaborates with a larger group of outsiders – both other groups and individuals. Insiders can have many overlapping interactions with many different groups on the edge. Typical examples would be an international organization that has its mission to connect to its constituencies; an organization committee is looking for input on a report from a number of experts around the world; a company wants to connect to segment of its customers to collaborate on a new product; a collaboration of a loosely-based consortium of institutions; a group organizes a conference and engages with potential speakers and attendees.

The segment I will talk about most on this blog is the Edge of Network. This is what we do, and stumbling upon most of its principles is why we were successful in getting things going: this segment is consistent with the mission of these international organizations.

It is by and large ignored by both commercial vendors and open source developers. Our customers could not find something existing to fit their requirements: commercial vendors tend to go for the large corporate customers and controlled environments of their intranets; open source is grassroots by definition, scratching the itch of many random individuals.

Implications

Different rules apply for each segment. One can easily navigate along several dimensions like level of trust, the interaction bandwidth level, length of involvement, etc. On most of these dimensions, the Edge falls between the two ends of a tight network and random individuals.

Asking a few simple questions and observing the principles of each segment, one can quickly figure out ways of working and choice of tools that will either support or negate one’s collaboration efforts.

For example, in a recent km4dev discussion, an individual asks about specific tools to support real-time sharing of documents and drawings between participants over the Internet, but without requiring any kind of installation on users’ computers – just by using online tools.

Using our segmentation, we can analyze individual’s requirements: he wants interaction characteristics of the tight network, within the physical and tool context of the edge of network or even random individual setting. I predict he will have a hard time before he can proclaim satisfaction, if ever. (Most likely, he will either have to relax his requirements and move towards network segment, agreeing on some common tools for participants to install, or drop the real-time editing/drawing requirement).

Future posts will outline more concrete characteristics of Edge of Network collaboration segment.

Edge of Network seems the most suitable form of collaboration in development sector, strongly dominated by organizations with missions to engage groups and individuals in large numbers.