Dude Where’s Your Crowd?

A colleague of mine posted a Facebook status update that got me thinking:

Kristen is appreciating the difference between “crowd sourcing” and “crowd building.”

Now I’ve thought about this idea before–frequently, actually–but had as yet not gotten down to putting some of my thoughts down on digital paper.  However, I think that it hits on a key problem that most people ignore when they are trying to collaborate inside a large organization, even with an open collaboration environment like a wiki.  I think one of the things that gets lost in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0/Social software movement, especially in the enterprise, is the social networking aspect of open collaboration.

Preparing for Battle

A quick, generic example: a person gets often get energize by the idea of “crowd sourcing” or working in the open.  Perhaps they read Wikinomics or had a discussion with a blogger or heard about Twitter.  In my own experience, it’s someone that’s heard about another group who has successfully collaborated using a wiki.  However, people will too often try to charge forward into the execution phase of a project without properly preparing a social network or rallying their collaborative constituency.

The best practice, in my experience at least, is that there needs to be a distinct “rallying” phase of any collaborative project.  During this phase, project leaders and facilitators have to get the social network in place to support the effort.  This can mean building a new social network where there was none before–a challenging feat–or “activating” a latent social network that was built previously–the preferable option.

Comparing the two approaches to rallying for some reason reminds me of buidling alliance in War Strategy games like Civilization III:  it’s much easier to build alliances with others when you are at peace than when you are war.  Translated into collaborative projects, it’s much easier to connect with new people based on potential common benefit than by trying to get them to do extra work.

Enough with your Rambling and Nerdery!

The underlying point of this post is to point out that when trying to build a collaborative constituency around a given problem, hope is not a strategy (a subject of a future post perhaps).  It takes work to get a collaborative project together.  It may take kickoff meetings, phone calls, parish calls, blog posts, emails, tweets, etc to get the word out to your community; however, successfully tackling a collaborative challenge should make all of this extra leg work worth while.