Collaboration Is As Hazardous For Chinese Wikipedia As For Corporate Use
The Washington Post has an article sizing up Internet censorship inside Mainland China. The article uses the Chinese edition of Wikipedia as an example of how a neutral web resource is viewed as disruptive by the Chinese government. Shi Zhao, a frequent Wikipedia contributor insists that "We aren't publishing political editorials, just providing information from a neutral point of view."
No matter how carefully the content of Wikipedia has crafted its articles to assuage the suspicions of Chinese officials, the site has still been repeatedly censored and is now completely blocked. Apparently, the most troubling characteristic of Wikipedia is not its content, but the formation of an independent community under a government "which has long sought to dominate all organized social activity. . . ."
Of course, the word "censorship" is always going to be a label for doing something wrong. It's a rhetorical phrase that immediately generates a political divide between moral good and bad. "Restrictive access" is more polished, but we can all recognize a euphemism when it pops up. So, it is with great interest that I find similar patterns of regulation within corporate collaboration projects.
BusinessWeek has an article extolling the wonders of collaboration and social network analysis. Organzational charts are being constructed from the working relationships of employees to "visualize the invisible, informal connections between people that are missing on a traditional organizational chart." IBM has been working on this technology and has found that "making the collaboration visible makes it much easier to talk about."
Except, that these charts aren't publically shared. "A map that reveals who is well-connected and who is not can be destructive if it is share too widely." So, these social charts which display networked work relations are carefully revealed. "Individuals can ask to see their portion of the maps . . . " but only the upper hierarchy are given complete access.
Politics, whether within a corporate bureaucracy or a national governement, is still just politics.
Bobby Woolf has added his insights to social network analysis, and ruminates that it would be interesting to use this method on SOA.
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