Group dynamics at the social computing symposium
Yesterday evening I had a little chat with Kevin Schofield in the #socialcomp
IRC channel right after the Social Computing Symposium ended. Schofield
works at Microsoft and has a lateral thinker / synthesist's dream job: connecting the unconnected, at the human level.
"Part of my team is responsible for making sure that we do a good job of
tech transfer in spite of the lack of internal financial incentives,
and we take a unique approach to doing it. I've spent a lot of time
looking at successes and failures of tech transfer our of research
labs, and I came to the conclusion that most people think of technology
transfer as some sort of Rube Goldberg machine -- technology goes in
one side, weird things happen in the middle, and if all goes well it
pops out on the other side. And people wonder why the landscape is
littered with failed attempts... Tech transfer, when successful, is not
a mechanical, logistical process; it's a social process. It's
all about people, communication, trust, and relationships. When I built
my tech transfer team, I decided that we would embrace this philosophy,
so I hired in the best relationship managers I could find and told them
that it was their job to build communication and trust between people
in MSR and people in our product groups. I told them that I didn't want
them devising forms, and processes, and procedures; I wanted them
building relationships. I told them that we were going to do this as an
act of faith that if we could build communication, trust and
relationships, then the tech transfer would take care of itself."
From what he told me, a similar process operated during the
symposium: while on the first day there seemed to be a divide between
ivory tower and industry folks (with people like Clay Shirky and danah boyd
holding a kind of middle ground), the informal conversations during
breaks and over dinner led to a better group cohesion in the second day.
The idea of informal exchanges helping build ties and being of prime
value to creative people is being increasingly brought into the
foreground from different directions. Clueful workshop and conference
organizers allow ample time for self-organizing discussion, and some
gatherings are deliberately very loosely structured - see e.g. open space meetings. With WiFi present, informal backchannels pop up and otherwise captive audiences rush inside as soon as things feel too stuffy.
The same realization is at work in weblogs that feature the unedited voice of a person
- the freeform, unfettered nature of weblogs is one of the key reasons
why they offer so much value to researchers and knowledge workers, as it enables readers and
writers alike to use the law of Two Feet at a very fine-grained level, going wherever they can to find the optimal conditions for learning and creating.
 11:11:19 AM
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