Hi Brian,
In my perception the main difference is who sets the rules. The time frame
in this light is only a following of many, also newly contributing persons
have the possibility to voice their preference. This would apply also to
structure coming out of such a process. One person or organization
controlling an important asset can lead to what may be perceived as
imbalance. An example is wikimedia foundation, and ultimately it's board,
controlling the websites domain name, and with it money flow. Would you see
a different "self" for content and money?
Best
Rupert
On Dec 8, 2015 02:49, "Brian Butler" <bsbutler(a)umd.edu> wrote:
Much of this comes down to how you define
“management”, “organizations”,
and “self”.
Once you allow for structures, roles (hierarchical or network based),
locally developed and enforced rules and practices, policed boundaries, and
other things included in most realistic self-managed groups then really the
only difference between self-managed organizations and “traditional” ones
is one of timeframe. If you look on a small timeframe management always
looked “imposed” and if you look on a longer timeframe all social systems
are “self-organizing" (since at least to this point there have been no
non-humans that have come into the world to do it for/to us).
All of this is to say that, yes Wikipedia and wikipedia teams can learn a
great deal from other organizations (and can teach other organizations a
lot).
(This is one of the big reasons that Wikipedia research is valuable beyond
the Wikipedia community).
Brian B.
—————————————————————————————————
Brian S. Butler, Ph.D.
Professor and Interim Dean, UMD iSchool
University of Maryland
College Park, MD USA
—————————————————————————————————
From: Wiki-research-l <wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org> on
behalf of Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
Reply-To: "kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>om>, Research
into Wikimedia content and communities <
wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Monday, December 7, 2015 at 6:41 PM
To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' <
wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] "Self-management" management philosophy
and Wikipedia
I’ve been part of teams that could probably be described as self-managing.
If you have the right mix of skills in people with the right attitude,
things can go really well without any kind of “management process” because
everyone is always thinking and talking about what’s coming up, what
problems we’ve still got to solve, all the time, and everyone trusts one
another. If teams have the ability to do their own recruitment (whether
internal/external), then you are more likely to get that outcome as they
want the new people they are bringing on board and those people want to be
in the team. However, in most organisations in the name of “productivity”,
it is more common to see teams formed by some arbitrary manager (not part
of the team) on the basis of “who’s available and has a vaguely relevant
set of skills” and whether or not that team “gels” is a matter of luck.
Having been given teams in those kind of circumstances, I know that some of
them may well be the folks “moved on” from another team who saw the chance
to get rid of a problem person.
I am sure there are “topics” or “projects” within Wikipedia which are
self-managing because, through luck, the folks attracted to them do have
the right skills and the right attitude. But I think it unlikely Wikipedia
as a whole could be self-managing in this way. With respect to volunteers,
we have no carrots to ensure we attract the right skills and we have very
little ability to prevent the entry of those with a “bad attitude”.
Increasingly organisations that have a large volunteer group now do very
pro-active volunteer management. People who go along to volunteer are often
taken aback to find there is a selection process to be taken on and that,
being taken on, involves committing to a regular roster or a minimum time
commitment each month to remain a volunteer. Some organisations even do
performance reviews on their volunteers. It’s fair to say that some of the
wannabe volunteers get quite offended by this, especially if they get
turned down or dropped.
Why don’t we have a set of training and quizzes to allow editors to gain
“competency certificates” on Wikipedia (in addition to certain levels of
experience at certain tasks – have created X new articles, rather than
simple edit counts) ? Then we could limit things like becoming an admin, or
participating in certain kinds of discussions e.g. AfD to those with
certain competencies. Similarly, if we could have articles graded for
quality (and now we have the automated means, this may be more reliable
than in the past), then we could restrict the editing of the FAs and GAs to
those with high levels of competency and allow editing of lower quality
articles by people with correspondingly fewer competencies. If you don’t
have the necessary competencies, you can write on the Talk page and request
your changes (which would be implemented by people with higher
competencies). But if it’s a stub, hey, anyone’s OK to have a go. Maybe
only someone with the referencing competency could add or remove
{{refimprove }} tags etc. Just thinking aloud …
Kerry
*From:* Wiki-research-l [
mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
<wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org>] *On Behalf Of *Pine W
*Sent:* Tuesday, 8 December 2015 7:42 AM
*To:* Wiki Research-l <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
*Subject:* [Wiki-research-l] "Self-management" management philosophy and
Wikipedia
This article reminds me a lot of how Wikipedia and its sister projects
work ideally:
http://www.self-managementinstitute.org/misperceptions-of-self-management
Of course we have some problems, some of them very thorny problems for
which we have yet to find long-term solutions. Perhaps by looking at the
experience of other orgs who are operating with similar philosophies, we
can derive solutions.
Pine
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