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<mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org>>
on behalf of Kerry Raymond
<kerry.raymond@gmail.com<mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com>>
Reply-To: "kerry.raymond@gmail.com<mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com>"
<kerry.raymond@gmail.com<mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com>>, Research into
Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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