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@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com>
Reply-To: "kerry.raymond@gmail.com" <kerry.raymond@gmail.com>, Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Monday, December 7, 2015 at 6:41 PM
To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' <wiki-research-l@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] On Behalf Of Pine W
Sent: Tuesday, 8 December 2015 7:42 AM
To: Wiki Research-l <wiki-research-l@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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