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?

This interview, with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker, elaborates how exposing the inner working of your company to your customers can have many, many benefits . Mozilla, as an organization, operates in a fishbowl. Very little of what happens inside of the company is hidden from public scrutiny. This poses some intersting management challenges, but at the end of the day has lead to exceptional products. Because Mozilla’s customers are so integral to its process, it’s much easier for it’s products to be what users want them to be

These vocal, contributory communities of customers – fostered by technologies like Clearspace X and management that supports open collaboration and transparency – could be referred to as “Marketing 2.0″. No degree of advertising could have given Firefox the level of momentum it has. Again, I’d wager that software companies aren’t the only businesses that harness their customers in this fashion. Opening the enterprise to two-way collaboration with customers will prove to be a competitive advantage. But it will take a touch of vision, and a certain willingness to have your mistakes publicized, to realize that value.