Sense of Ownership

Sense of ownership is a very important success factor of collaboration on the edge of network. People owning their communities put effort into creating engaging collaborative environments, helping them achieve their goals.

Indeed, sense of ownership is important in every aspect of human creation and being – it is not limited to collaboration. Yet in collaboration on the edge it is one of three key success factors.

On the edge of network, we’re bringing together weakly connected, disparate people from around the world. Communication bandwidth between the inside and the outside is limited, as is the bandwidth between those on the outside. A community leader, the one who brought the people together has to put effort beyond just inviting people to join. This has been proven times and times again: virtual communities don’t just get together and grow by themselves. One has to nurture a community to help it grow. It is essential to empower and motivate a community leader to nurture his or her community.

People have the need to express their identity and affiliation and through that expression they feel a sense of ownership, which motivates them to act.To that effect, a simple customization of putting a logo of one’s own organization or changing the URL to show organization’s identity goes a long way towards feeling that sense of ownership.

People often ask me what is the difference between a discussion on the platform we’ve developed and Yahoo! Groups? My answer is, “the logo.” Experience shows people are willing to put much more effort into a community or a web site carrying their name then an anonymous community on some large service like mentioned Yahoo! Groups.

In many ways, we’re helping people build and nurture their own brands. So far, we only had the option for people to put up a logo for their community, or set up a separate URL for a set of communities. This has proven to be so important and successful, now we’re adding customized community homepage designs.

If one wants to enable collaboration on a large scale, the ability to allow feeling of sense of ownership to different groups and individuals is critical. Most today’s technical and hosting platforms are not optimized for that, largely due to platform creator’s need to promote own brand.