Post: Prom1 - a study in online cross-cultural collaboration- structured or emergent

Hi Suresh and readers of my open letters at http://dadamac.posterous.com

Introduction

I'm responding to a list of challenges described by Suresh, and I'm using them in the context of the COTW ProM project. I've copied the headings in my response, and the full list of headings and explanations are in Suresh's email copied below my response.

Coalition of the Willing (COTW) http://www.dadamac.net/network/coalition-willing

I like the list and also the clarity of thought that Suresh brings to the ProM project. Different people will see ProM in different ways. It may therefore help to reduce confusion if I state my viewpoint before writing my response. I come to this project as a teacher, and a compulsive learner, with an interest in the impact of computers on education systems - and other systems. My interest began way back when the Apple II was leading edge. My current interests related to education are expressed here - Dadamacadamy - dream or reality .As I see it the ProM project reached the end of its first stage as we approached Easter. At that point there was widespread agreement that we should review and regroup. We have done extensive valuable de-briefing, and are now all regrouping in various ways.

Regarding the information focus of COTW - This is about finding shared interests. I have a "normal citizen's concern" regarding climate change and a poorly defined feeling that "I should be doing more about it". I also come to COTW on behalf of the Dadamac community. Various people are concerned with practical problems related to water security (although not necessarily expressed in those terms - more likely expressed in terms of failed harvest, drought, and experiments with water harvesting, irrigation and permaculture ) Ref saving water - and Climate Change - thanks Sam and Graham Hopes & dreams to make ends meet, due to climatic change! - some figures [mendenyo] Horrible! Horrible!
Regarding the online community-building focus of COTW - I have a very strong interest in the whole area of "Post-Web" living and the kind of collaboration that it enables. I was drawn into this in 2000 by a Nigerian friend (see Peter Adetunji Oyawale ). As a result I have spent the best part of eleven years in online collaborations of one kind and another, with special emphasis on cross-cultural collaboration and overcoming the challenges of low bandwidth.
Regarding the technology used by COTW - I'm no techie, but I am a user of tech. Most of what I know I've learned on a need to know basis, from friends and contacts who have helped me to learn-by-doing over the years (most recently learning about etherpads thanks to COTW). I also think I was lucky to have been around when 32K of memory was considered generous and we often had to type in any programs we wanted to use - so we did get an understanding of the essential differences between human/analogue information processing and computer/digital information processing.

My response

I've structured my response against the headings that Suresh has given - but with my own interpretation of what those heading cover. His full list and explanations are copied in full later. My comments are all indented.

The list of Challenges that Suresh gives

CHALLENGES

I think the two "problems" mentioned below are probably best seen as two complementary "streams" - both related to how the people who are drawn to COTW find the right "other people and projects" for useful collaboration.

The Project Matching Problem

As I understand it this refers more to the "techie side of ProM" - writing programmes that will automate aspects of helping people/organisations to find collaborators

The Open Project Problem

As I understand it this refers more to the social or community side of ProM - managing the people/organisations who come and enabling them to have an online space where they can connect up and collaborate.

Lessons from research at UK Open University
Research on use of the Open Learn resources identifies two different student groupings - 1 - those who were attracted to course materials to study the course materials. 2- those who used the attraction of the course materials to find others who had a shared interest in those areas of study, so they could learn from each other. http://www.slideshare.net/CdeLondon/ride-talk-josie-taylors-version

Some of the challenges :

Aligning Intentions:

I see this as relating to my item 1 above - finding shared interests. Finding overlapping interests/initiatives/intentions is a challenge. It takes time.

Defining the Boundaries of Open Projects: (people get involved in such projects even if they have no interest in the substance or focus of the project! )

As I see it, this is to do with the three elments of any ICT4D project - in the case of COTW its ICT for Climate Change. In any ICT4D project people are attracted to ICT4D projects for either the "Information" element, or the "Communication/Community" element or the "Technology" element or a mixture of all three. Lack of clarity on this is a common cause of confusion and people "talking past each other". (For example when ICT4D people whose mind set is 1: "technology as development" mix with those whose mind set is 2 - "technology for development" - I wasted most of 2008 mystified by practical instances of this until someone gave me those two phrases which enabled me to recognise why we were talking past each other.)

The Importance of the Social Dimension:

Relates to my item 2 in the three part list - the online community-building focus. If people who have never met face to face (and are never likely to do so) are going to join together to work productively then they need to get to know each other first. They need to recognise overlapping interests, to explore preferred ways of working, and start to build high trust teams before actually working on any projects . For people coming to an online collaboration from a culture of online collaboration and emergence the first "work" they will probably choose to do in any project is the "getting to know each other" foundational to community building.

There are different ways to do this community building. Some people prefer to recognise it as a step in its own right. Some prefer to go straight in with a specific project and do the community building as part of the project itself - either as a managed and reflective part of the project or in a more ad hoc way.

Defining Process: the balance between structure and emergence:

This is an important issue which was well illustrated in Prom1 and is one reason why Prom1 is such a valuable part of our shared culture. It illustrated the challenge of two opposing cultures trying to work together. To overstate and simplify the challenge in bringing together a mixed group with some proponents of structure and some proponent of emergence - there are two mind-sets.

1 - "We can't do anything together until we have structures in place"
2 - "We can't put any structures in place until we have done something together".

This cultural clash may result in stalemate, or agreement to break into separate cultural groups, or negotiation between the groups, or a fight for dominance between the cultural groups - or a mixture of all of these. Dominance by one of cultural groups through force rather than agreement tends to cause alienation amongst members of the other group. They will signify this either by leaving (the easiest and most likely response in a group where people are working informally for no pay, but for intangible rewards) or they will stay and fight for the inclusion and representation of their own culture (which can be disruptive and exhausting for all concerned).

Leadership and Governance:
Furthermore, everyone knows that leadership (however defined) is necessary but very few are willing to follow in the absence of non-monetary incentives...

I beg to differ. There are many rewards which are non-monetary - but that is a separate discussion.

Looking forward to the next stage of ProM
From my perspective - an emergent one - Prom1 has been a valuable step in building the COTW community and giving us a shared history and "shared behavioural vocabulary" to call on for the next stages of our work together.

Some way into the project we looked briefly at the stages of team building - forming, storming, norming, performing. To my mind, at that point we were all still in the "forming" stage - unsure of our roles, feeling our way about how we were organising ourselves to work together. We then moved, predictably to the next stage - storming - where we aired our differences and frustrations in forthright ways. This is a dangerous stage which, in my opinion, we negotiated triumphantly. It is easy for people to either leave at the storming stage, or just do a little storming - to let off steam - and then fall back into the comparative safety and politeness of "forming" with nothing really having been resolved.

COTW doesn't work in that half hearted kind of way. COTW seems to attract strong characters, who tend to be passionate about what they/we are doing and they/we are practical problem solvers - even if we come from different cultures, solving different kinds of problems, and using different styles to do so. Being such a diverse group of passionate practitioners we are therefor stormers par excellence.

I love the COTW team and the way it rode out its storm. I'm loving the way that the new groups are emerging for the next stages of our work. I have no idea what is going on in the structured side of things - but I trust that side of things to go ahead in its own way - and I trust the "cross-cultural mediators" - the people who stand between both cultures to keep an eye on both cultures and make sure we are all heading in more or less in the same direction. I think we have gone a long way forward now towards "norming" - i.e. knowing who can do what, and how we normally go about things. As we get more confident about that our level of "performing" will reach new heights. (I also think that when people in the "emergent" culture have done enough to start looking back and defining their structures, then the "structured people" will find the "emergents" easier to work with - but that is a separate discussion).

Pamela
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---------- Forwarded message ----------From: Suresh Fernando

Since this is an open project everyone is free to work on these ideas, so please let us know if you think this is a worthy project that serve the larger interests of the various sub-projects associated Next Net and Contact... if so we can take the various lessons that we have all learned related to the challenges of open collaboration and attempt to reconstitute the process.

CHALLENGES
In the course of my ongoing attempts to advance the development of a project matching system in an open collaboration environment two specific sets of problems have arisen:

The Project Matching Problem
The Open Project Problem

The Project Matching Problem
As is evidenced by, among other things, the energy and activity in the Next Net and Contact Google Groups, there are many bright people with bright ideas that are working on problems that appear to have potential synergy and for whom a matching mechanism that is described by these concept documents might be relevant. If we are to make this system work, we need to figure out the secret sauce, so to speak, which requires that we come to understand what metadata about projects should be represented in an open space such that this metadata can be used to connect projects. This is not a trivial problem. This also requires that we identify a process to figure this out... also not a trivial problem.

The Open Project Problem
An even less trivial problem, I have come to realize, is exactly how to organize a virtually distributed group of people in such a way as to align their activity around finding the solution to a particular problem. This needs to be resolved for two reasons:

We cannot solve The Project Matching Problem in advance of solving the Open Project Problem (at least not in a distributed environment in the absence of financial incentives).
Even if we solve The Project Matching Problem, projects that are matched will not be able to effectively collaborate in open environments if we cannot solve the Open Project Problem.

Some of the challenges relating to the Open Project Problem are:

Aligning Intentions: even to the extent to which people have an intuition that they are aligned, people bring different agendas and perspectives to open projects. Since there is no financial incentives to participation in open projects, engagement in the projects requires that people feel that their own personal requirements are satisfied. This leads to challenges in terms of actually coordinating activity around specific tasks.

Defining the Boundaries of Open Projects: one of the more interesting features of Open Projects is that people get involved in such projects even if they have no interest in the substance or focus of the project! I surmise that this has something to do with virtual culture, and the nature of those that are interested in email conversations and participation in email lists. My experience is that sufficient activity, energy and ideas is enough to generate perceived momentum and lots of discussion but this cannot be mistaken for focused activity, Hence there needs to be some consideration relating to what aspects of open environments need to be closed. There needs to be an Intake Process.

The Importance of the Social Dimension: Of great importance in environments where there is no financial motivation for people to participate in projects is consideration for other reasons that people get involved in projects. One important feature is the social relations that are formed. Since this is so, there will always be a tension between those that have a clearly defined project objectives and those that are involved for, or prioritize higher, the need for social relations within virtual contexts. Some people may in fact be involved in Open Project primarily to form social relations.

Defining Process: the balance between structure and emergence: A related problem is the complexity associated with defining processes within Open Project environments. There is a natural tension between those that have clear intentions or goals and those that are more focused on the social dimension. This makes the formulation of, as well as the commitment to, process a complex issue.

Leadership and Governance: Of course all of the above makes the issue of leadership in Open Projects a highly complex one. Since everyone needs to have a stake in the formation of an idea (the idea itself needs to be generated collaboratively), there is no clear person(s) that should have the privilege or responsibility to lead a project. Leadership itself needs to be emergent. This might sound like an innovative notion but is very difficult to operationalize. Even if it is determined that the process should be a meritocracy, it is not clear how merit should be quantified. What system should we use?

Furthermore, everyone knows that leadership (however defined) is necessary but very few are willing to follow in the absence of non-monetary incentives...

.... there is more to be said, but enough for now....

I look forward to your thoughts...

Suresh

Prom1 - a study in online cross-cultural collaboration- structured or emergent May 1, 2011