Jay and I had a banging good time today attending Jive’s Clearspace Administrator training. Our instructor for the session, Ricky Palmer, gave a great run down on the robust capabilities available to the man (or woman) behind the curtain. We had seen the latest release of the product, but this session gave a much better feel for what I sort of refer to as “Floodgates on the River Collaboration.”
As I was sitting in the session today, tweeting my thoughts on Enterprise 2.0, I began to ponder the value of moderating collaboration. If you haven’t had a chance to see the admin features in Clearspace, they are robusto. Essentially, you can control everything. It ranges from deciding who can and can not blog to creating automated filters for users with a propensity to curse like a a trucker. It is very clear (at least to me) that their content moderation approach was baked via their deep experience with forums facing the jagged masses of the public internet. And as their marketing guns also seem to have shifted aim toward powering external communities, these capabilities make even more sense. But I wonder….could these same capabilities, which are much needed on the public facing side of collaboration, provide an opportunity to over-manage an internal user community?
I contrast the capabilities I saw today with those available in the (internal) enterprise Wiki I administer, powered by Atlassian’s Confluence. Hands down, Confluence has nowhere near the control and admin capabilities of Clearspace. And when implementing in a low-risk, high-lawyer internal environment I fear that the mere presence of such control may encourage unnecessary administrative fear-mongering. By extension, the resulting collaboration environment could be so locked down that the users contribute little content and create little value.
Frankly, I sort of like the idea that if some moron in my company drops an F bomb on a blog post, that slickness is immediately exposed to the entire company. I hope he gets fired. And HR keeps the post up as an example of “what not to do with the enterprise Wiki.” If you are that dense I am 1) glad other people know, 2) convinced you don’t deserve a job here, and 3) now aware that we might need more stringent hiring practices. All good things in my book. This staffing action can happen in our Wiki. If the filtering capability was there, I am not sure I could have convinced the risk-dodgers to turn it off.
On another other hand, Clearspace’s admin capabilities do a great job of providing much needed structure and tailoring to the collaboration needs of a community. I would guess that their adoption rates are much quicker with the vast majority of users than that of a wiki. The blank-slate paradigm works only for the hyper-creative. We continue to run into adoption issues with people who “just want more structure” or “don’t know where to start”. We could very easily solve this is we had the admin capabilities of Clearspace.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Clearspace is an awesome product with a boatload of power. It toasts my E2 Reuben for sure. The administrative capabilities are both flexible and powerful. But as with any powerful tool placed in paranoid hands, incorrect use could lead to undesired results. Maybe the answer is don’t let the FUDdites know some of the the admin capabilities exist? Maybe different communities need different paradigms?
What do you think?
4 responses so far ↓
1 Austin // May 16, 2008 at 11:42 am
Aside from the hyperusers, adoption will only happen if one of two things happen: use is required (fear) or users see a clear benefit for their volutary use of the product. “Middle class” users will not see the benefit in using a product like Confluence without some degree of support (training, templates, examples, handholding, etc).
That said, (as a user of confluence), I would want to see some usage of the capabilities you saw in Clearspace to extend the interest (don’t lock it down but provide more options to both hypousers and hyperusers).
I agree with just marketing the capabilities that an team charged with building collaboration deems necessary to fit their particular organization and hiding the rest.
2 Nate Nash // May 17, 2008 at 9:23 am
Thanks for the comment Austin! I agree that some of the capabilities I describe could be helpful in spurring additional adoption amongst the “middle class” users. However, I worry that if some of those controls were engaged in the early days, the hyperusers (who have carried the implementation so far), would not have been able to flex their creative muscles.
An example of something that Confluence empowered due to its blank slate capabilities is the Advisor Tracking app. I am pretty sure that this could not be accomplished in Clearspace.
An example of something that could be accomplished much more elegantly in Clearspace is the Clearinghouse.
Finding the middle ground is tough…maybe one approach is a predecessor to the other…
3 Justin // May 21, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Well, as the still sole administrative edit in our wiki, and given the proximity of the offense to the “I hope he gets fired” above… Albeit mine was a touch wittier.
Complete transparency is not a bad thing – it is only a scary thing. It is scary because it means multiple things – we must expose our weaknesses and thoughts before we are ready, and we must then not judge others for doing the same. A truly merits based system requires a mixing of transparency with honesty. Hiding behind the “management only” decision making so keep your nose out tree is a facet of laziness, not management…
At some point we must embrace the path we preach to the third world countries – that attempting to control the innovation within your borders stifles the innovation, and stifles the bringing in of money. Letting go yields more fruit than holding tight, and in the end your decision to enable that paradigm will be remembered (even if not in the immediate) – however squeezing the child to death in its infancy for fear of its future will have you known earlier, but for the wrong reasons.
4 Ric // Jul 1, 2008 at 10:47 am
What’s so bad about the F-bomb?
DHH (of rails and 37signals fame) thinks it’s not so bad:
http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/15-potty-mouths
In fact, he dislikes the term ‘F-bomb’ more than the word on which you’re trying to put the proverbial fig-leaf.
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