Let’s Talk About the “C” Words

Communication. Cooperation. Collaboration. Connection.

Niall Cook describes the above as the 4Cs approach to social networking in his book, Enterprise 2.0 – How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work. He uses the 4Cs to categorise social software tools.

Communication

Image via Flickr by Tony Dowler

Cook says that many organisations use the intranet as a downward communication channel – a place for management and HR to provide useful and essential information to staff such as policies, procedures and company news, with perhaps a space for staff to post social event information.

That’s not to say informal communication doesn’t happen within an organisation – of course it does, via emails between colleagues or groups and via that good old-fashioned form of communication – talking, be it over the desk dividers, over coffee or over the phone.

The idea of moving towards a social intranet is that all staff can then benefit from the useful information that is often shared in those conversations, perhaps using tools such as discussion forums, or blogs with comments enabled.

Connection

Image via Flickr by Jlhopgood

In my last post, I discussed tagging and categorising – these are forms of connection. Connecting isn’t just about connecting people with people; it’s about connecting people with the information they need. An example of connection could be enabling tagging within a corporate intranet, then educating people as to how to tag pages.

Tagging, or social bookmarking, could be an easy way of starting a cultural shift towards social tools within an organisation – adding a tag is a low-risk way of sharing and if enough people collaborate by contributing, all staff will see some quick wins as search results become more targeted and relevant.

Cooperation and Collaboration

Image via Flickr by Nazarene Missions International

Is it cooperation or collaboration? I confess; I’m a word nerd, and I spent some time Googling this just for fun. The English Language and Usage section of Stack Exchange has perhaps an oversimplified explanation. Cooperation is described as working with someone to enable them, whereas cooperation is defined as working alongside someone towards something.

There’s also a really interesting discussion on Harold Jarche’s blog, Life in Perpetual Beta, triggered by his blog post, In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration.

In a nutshell, collaboration is about working together towards a shared goal. Resources, risks and rewards are shared. Cooperation is also about working together, but there is still a division of labour, tasks and responsibilities, with each piece separate, but part of the whole.

An example of cooperation in a social networking sense could be a project site on the intranet where each person involved in the project could add their information and contribute to discussions. The whole team then has all information at their fingertips, not just the minutes of a weekly progress meeting to refer to.

Jarche says “collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate”.

This is an interesting point.

You can cooperate without collaborating, if collaboration is not the end goal, but can you have any form of collaboration without cooperation?

A wiki is an example of a collaborative tool – all approved users can add or update information and share the knowledge instead of keeping individual notes. An example could be a customer service team with a wiki knowledge base – instead of sharing topical information for customer enquiries via email or on a noticeboard, team members add information to a wiki. Information is searchable, easily accessible and up-to-date.

However, even a collaborative tool such as a wiki involves a degree of cooperation – the collaborative plan or structure could be said to be that everyone ensures content is up to date and relevant, but for this to work a certain degree of cooperation by individuals is assumed.

In closing, I wanted to share a collaborative discovery tool I found – Opinion Space, developed by  University of California Berkeley

One central question is posed, then users “rate” others’ responses, using a sliding scale. Users then create their own response to be rated by other users. The colour, size and location of each opinion on the “map” all mean something, for example the ideas rated as insightful feature prominently.

The Opinion Space website gives links to past and present opinion space projects by different users. One such organisation is the US Department of State – their current question is, appropriately, about using technology to enhance open public dialogue.

This is just one tool I found. What other cool collaborative tools have you discovered or used online?