> 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?
“Who sets the rules” — this is an issue of governance, decision-rights, and the nature of rules. The reality is that rules are always collectively made and enforced. Even dictatorships only work when the larger population accepts the rules and assists in the enforcement of them (so in this sense, any system in necessarily "self-managing”). “One person or organization controlling an important asset can lead to what may be perceived as imbalance.” — but the presence of imbalance is ubiquitous. There are always going to be imbalances, concentrations of resources/power/control, etc. This is the nature of constrained reality. Even in the most stereotypical of “self-managed” teams these imbalances persist. > 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? But this posits that the foundation isn’t part of “self-management”. Why? It is a concentration of authority and decision-rights that was arose from within a social system to handle certain problems – concentrating some forms of power and control and leaving others distributed. While we can debate whether this is a good/effective/desirable/fair way of organizing, it is difficult to see how it could be characterized as externally imposed (I.e. not arising from the collective ‘self’). (Now whether any given person or subgroup is happy with the outcome of the “self-organization” … that’s a different question.) The issue is that “self-managing” is not a very precise term — and because of that it rarely provides a good basis for either analysis or constructive discussion. If only because for most people “self” means “me” … So people talking about “self-management” often end up implicitly saying “But the real problem is that I don’t get to be in control of X ….” (which is a fine thing to discuss, but why complicate it with fancy term that hides the real point…). ————————————————————————————————— Brian S. Butler, Ph.D. Professor and Interim Dean, UMD iSchool University of Maryland College Park, MD USA ————————————————————————————————— From: Wiki-research-l <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of rupert THURNER <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Tuesday, December 8, 2015 at 3:08 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] "Self-management" management philosophy and Wikipedia 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" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of Kerry Raymond <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Monday, December 7, 2015 at 6:41 PM To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Tuesday, 8 December 2015 7:42 AM To: Wiki Research-l <[email protected]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
