Define social collaboration Magazine

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25.07.2008, Melissa Adey, 0 Comments

Seth Godin recently wrote a blog entry entitled ‘The web doesn’t care’ in which he spoke of the web as a medium which, unlike TV, newspapers, etc, isn’t designed to please businesses. He said the web represents the first time in history that there has been a medium for mass marketing that is not built upon ads. And this requires a drastic re-think if companies and markers are to benefit from this medium. This shift moves business from the position of asking what a medium (e.g. TV, Radio, etc) can do for them, to what they can do for users of that medium – or to put it in his words to asking “how can I help them achieve their goals?"

Sound familiar? It seems social collaboration platforms are pretty spot on.

See Seth's blog post - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/the-web-doesnt.html)

24.06.2008, Melissa Adey, 0 Comments

Information gathering

Possibly one of the most vital things to do for this project is to gather information. If we are trying to define a movement or phenomena then we need to really map where we see it occurring and what has already been said about it.

I will start by adding what I have found from my research to this project – the aim is to create something like a dossier for social collaboration. But this is not a one women job! It would be great if you could all post links to things you find. What I mean here is if you read a book (e.g. Wisdom of The Crowds) or article, find a blog about it, or a site doing it (e.g. Amazee), or anything that strikes you in some way as illustrating, defining, commenting on, challenging, etc. social collaboration, then it would be great it if you would share it and so, from what is gathered, we can really map out the phenomena. I've created a Wiki called Information Gathering and links can be posted there.

Image: sweetpea.loty30, CC.

Timeline

Project Bio:

The aim of this project is to define social collaboration with a view to informing a white paper on the subject. Key issues it will address are what is social collaboration? What is its place in the globe, in our lives and in social media and what is its origins and future?

The finished white paper will be written under creative commons and will aacknowledge all those who collaborated in this project.

A note on method....
Given that these are rather big questions it may be useful to split the process down a little. As this project aims to be free and open I will put initial ideas on how we can collaborate but you have a better idea or improvements then tell me!

Call for contributions

What we need are:

1) Definitions: from your own view of what it's all about either a 5 word, 20 word or 100 word definition of social collaboration (or better still all three). Add them to the discussion "Submit Definition for Social Collaboration".

2) Your experience: please send in short anecdotes or longer stories of how you have collaborated on the web, be it successfully or unsuccessfully. Preferably write these in a text editor and upload them as files. Keep it anonymous if you like but remember I can only acknowledge your contributions if I know who you are!

3) Information Gathering: post a link of anything that strikes you as having something to do with social collaboration. This can be a picture, a blog, a book, a site (e.g. Amazee), a article, a news story, etc. Please post your links to the ‘Information Gathering’ section on the Wiki tab.

Social Media in Plain English - By Common Craft