The recent flap at and about Digg, which first pulled then allowed community-generated posts w/ a key for breaking DVD encryption, is an example of one way social computing and the user generation of 'content' (hate that word) can lead to conflict. Jevon MacDonald has written about the flap on the FASTf0rward blog.
Is it a surprise that conflicts arise in a community? I don't think so. But, many of us tend towards a kind of techno-utopianism, believing that a 'content democracy' has within it - almost by definition - the tools to resolve conflict. You can look at the Digg issue resolution as confirming the point or as disproving it (the community will not share liability should Digg be sued).
Behind this techno-utopianism is a primitive form of libertarian political views. By primitive, I don't necessarily mean unintelligent, not at all, but primitive all the same - a few simple ideas, not really open to examination or disproof, upon which many judgments depend.
Perhaps the problems at Digg will help us examine such ideas? The examination would be useful for those of us involved in advice or consulting in respect of changing organizations via Enterprise 2.0 tools. Changing the work done in them or changing their culture.
I've written about Dion Hinchcliffe's excellent post on this subject. Like Dion, I'm an optimist on the subject. I too believe that new tools can catalyze new initiatives and new cultural values.
But, we ought to understand as well the complexity of these changes, and the inherent limitations they may face in any particular context or for any particular enterprise or other entity. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal illustrates the extraordinary complex of problems that can arise around such change. The article investigates SAP's changing culture as it globalizes and distributes decision-making and product development to compete in a '2.0′ world.
This is essential reading. I read the paper edition of the article on an airplane last friday, the day it came out, but it looks like most of the text is captured here.
About ten days ago, Dave Winer wrote a post comparing Twitter to a coral reef. "Calling a technology a coral reef is the highest compliment I can pay." I'll torque Dave's metaphor slightly by applying it to social computing as a whole. Coral reefs are marvelous entities, developing and feeding ecologies and becoming beautiful. But, they are quite sensitive to externalities - should the surrounding temperature rise even slightly, the reef's survival can be threatened.
In just this way, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and many other social computing initiatives engage in a critical, sensitive way with their externalities - the cultures and core interests of the people they impact. Those of us who paid some attention to SAP's recent Sapphire conference in Atlanta know that SAP is committed to this new set of technologies. But the Digg story and the SAP story should get us thinking about the pace, methods, limits and effects of change. It's our role to be optimists, but we need to be realists as well. We need to constantly rethink our 'primitives.'
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