Collaboration may happen by luck : how to provide valuable information without purpose

You must have already heard about serendipity, the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. This is the best way to gout out of the common path instead of recycling the same ideas again and again, which often leads to the same overused solutions. But in  order to find something by luck, someone should have made it available without knowing if it would be useful for anybody, and in which purpose, if not we stay in a classic system where people keep information for themselves or only give it to those they think need it. With two consequences : people we don’t know they woudl find the information useful are not informed and people we wrongly think they need it are flooded by unsolicited infomation.

This must make us remember that, when talking about information sharing, we must not have any a priori about addressees, knowing that what’s gold for someone may be mud for someone else and vice versa.

Let me explain this by the example, trough a situation I experienced myself last week.

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Tags and networking drive E 2.0 adoption…and relativize importance of collaboration

I wrote a few lines about the discovery of the power of web 2.0 tools at accenture a few months ago. This article from socialcomputing magasine tells us more about what’s happening there.

The conclusion is that adoption is really driven by tagging and social networking functions. A very good start according to me. But it seems some people are not satisfied because such practices are taking E2.0 concept far away from the conception they have of it. I was quite surprised to read Tom Mandel’s words about it :

“These technologies seem to lean more in the direction of social networking and rather away from collaboration.”

And so what ? Does it mean E2.0′s ultimate goal is collaboration ? That E2.0 is mainly about collaboration ? I’m very far from thinking that. Enterprise 2.0 is about a lof of things and collaboration is only one of them. More, and I’ll explain it in a later note, I think collaboration has to be redefined in a 2.0 context…

Whatever, the conclusion is splitting hair because things tends more towards social networking than collaboration is useless.

Another point is that, in order to make people make things together (I prefer this term rather than collaborate), we should give them the opportunity to identify each other, know each other, and build a trusted relationship. Networking may be a first step to collaboration, so be patient. And isn’t tagging a first form of collaborative practice ?