One of my favorite blogs, Web Worker Daily summarizes an interview they recently did with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. While the occasion was for the launch of 3.0, the general focus of the conversation is on collaborative networks and how they relate to enterprise-level wikis.
In laying the groundwork for talking about the specific details of Socialtext, he emphasizes the value of weak ties or dynamic peripheries. Traditionally, old-school groupware mostly served the needs of the core (e.g., the group’s executive leadership ranks) or the strong ties, but Mayfield’s Socialtext focuses on activating those dynamic peripheries.
Mayfield also explained how Socialtext allows workers to customize their dashboards similar to the way in which they would customize a Facebook page (e.g., images, audio, video, slides, personal info). He goes on to point out that this can be very useful for giving people a greater sense of connectedness especially in those virtual team contexts where members can be spread out widely across time zones and continents with very little, if any, opportunity for F2F interaction. This emphasis on personalizing or customizing virtual work spaces intersects with research such as that by Sarah Hurlburt in the Journal of Online Learning & Teaching where she discusses it in the context of using blogs in her online courses — Personalization of the blog environment is necessary to create the private space effect …).
For anyone interested in reading more about collaboration/network theory and distributed cognition, there’s a hefty volume out there (Latour’s Reassembling the Social; Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild). One of the more recent entries is Clay Spinuzzi’s Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications. I haven’t had a chance to read Spinuzzi’s but definitely plan to add it to the ever-expanding reading list.
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wiki, Socialtext, Ross Mayfield, Web Worker Daily