In late September I went to New Orleans for ten days following the Katrina Hurricane to observe the deployment of Groove, a peer to peer technology recently acquired by Microsoft that enables ad hoc, cross organization collaboration. A distaster zone is an extremely technically and socially challenged environment, making collaboration across groups very difficult at a time when failure to cooperate can be measured in human lives. (Send me an email if you want to see the paper we wrote about the experience.) One of the main lessons I learned during those ten days was that in such a pressured environment, where the usual channels for acquiring resources or information no longer worked, people often pursue less traditional channels; that is, through their trusted social relationships. In other words, they were tapping into their social capitol. As a consequence many informal, ephemeral ‘workgroups’ addressing specific problems would emerge across organizations through these social relationships.
Having observed this effect in such an extreme environment, I have since spent a fair amount of time considering the kinds of technological solutions that could aid the development of these ad hoc groups under time-pressured situations where interpersonal trust matters. Now, back here in Seattle, I find myself again observing over and over how often the most effective interdisciplinary collaborations develop through these trusted social relationships. Recently at Microsoft, for example, one of my more fun and interesting projects -SLAM- arose out of a collaboration between me and two friends, who wanted to work together, had common interests, and trusted each other. Lately I have been particularly interested in the technical arts community, where some of the most innovative work involves diverse people working together: electrical engineers and sculptors, architects and social scientists, developers and painters.
Increasingly communication technologies have opened up avenues for sharing information and developing relationships around common interests irrespective of organization, social hierarchy, or geographical location. These social relationships then evolve into nimble, ephemeral, project based collaborations that often arise directly in response to environmental pressures (such as hurricanes, political movements, fluctuations in the economy, etc), mediated by technology through mailing lists, social networking appliciations, cell phones, wikis, blogs… It’s a new form of workgroup, enabled by communication technologies, that I believe is transforming our notions of how to effectively ‘get things done’.
For example friends of mine - Dan and Lara - recently started an alternative business networking group called biznik. I met with them recently to talk about how they might best integrate some of the newer, emerging social technologies into biznik (blogs, reputation systems etc.) to facilitate achieving their group’s goals. I was extremely excited when Dan read to me the description of a biznik he had posted to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biznik, in which it is noted that “Bizniks view themselves as belonging to an urban tribe for business, a supportive network that encourages creativity, radical thinking, and community”. Here you have a group of independent professionals, using a web site and regular face-to-face meetings to develop an affinity network of trusted social and business relationships. If you needed a nimble team of individuals with a diverse skill-set to solve a time-pressured problem - a loose collection of individuals who already trusted each other and had both the communication infrastructure and decision-making agility in place to respond immediately to new situations - you might go to a biznik group.
