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:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Pine W
Sent: Tuesday, 8 December 2015 7:42 AM
To: Wiki Research-l <[email protected]>
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
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
