Enterprise 2.0 Angels and Demons, Part 2: Taggin’ Thomas
July 15, 2009
Filed Under: in Analysis, Featured Articles, Social Media
Author: Karyn German
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I'm not sure I can promise a trilogy, but I can follow up with at least one more installment of Enterprise 2.0 Angels and Demons with the story of Taggin' Thomas. This story is about more than tagging, but I had to follow my pattern of alliterative names. And, leaving the 'g' off of tagging makes the name more folksy, dontcha know?
Thomas is a knowledge management (KM) professional and a leading sponsor of his company's internal social computing efforts. Thomas remembers the late 90's well and, while he is enthusiastic about the new tools and technologies, he is still a firm believer in the importance of well-organized information sources. The Enterprise 2.0 Steering Committee at Thomas' company is looking to him to help define guidelines for how to structure content and also for interacting with that content. Tom earnestly came up with the following activities and suggestions:
Define a comprehensive taxonomy of all blogs, wikis, communities and RSS feeds. This taxonomy will need to be approved by 10 other members of the steering committee. Early estimates suggest a 3 month development timeline for the initial version. Once the taxonomy has been deployed, changes to it will be accepted via a formal request and approval process. - Tagging guidelines must be developed. In fact, Thomas would prefer that tagging be limited to a select group of KM professionals who understand how to develop and maintain an ontology. Once the "folksonomy" (Thomas hates that term) has been properly seeded, then tagging will be opened up to more people, but certainly not to everyone who interacts with the content.
- All discussion forums will be strictly moderated. Thomas has participated in numerous online communities and he knows that discussions can quickly get out of hand. Off topic threads, abusive behavior and too many top-level topics make him squeamish - he feels the need to wash his virtual hands when he participates in such messy and chaotic environments. He'll be damned if that happens within his company on his watch!
Is Thomas and Angel or a Demon? Well, to be fair, I haven't exactly painted him in a positive light. He has come across as neurotic, old-fashioned and a little prissy. But truth be told, Thomas actually has some good intentions that can be tweaked. Here is what I would suggest to Thomas:
A taxonomy is not a bad thing. But, is it necessary in a social computing platform? Strong search capabilities are a core component of Enterprise 2.0 (SLATES, anyone?), so finding content, people and communities should be easy. But, even more core to social computing is the emergent nature of the technology. If I am connecting to content, people and community effectively, knowledge discovery becomes more organic. Isn't it worthwhile to forgo the burden of maintaining a taxonomy to give up the edge case of someone browsing to the information they think they might need? For what it is worth, I lead the ontological development of a massive product development database in the late 90's, so I know how costly this type of work can be. Ah, those were the good old days.
I believe that suggested guidelines for tagging is a very good idea. But, I would never suggest that tagging be locked down so tightly. Some guidelines one might use include:
If the content is already well tagged by the publisher, it is perfectly ok to refrain from adding additional tags.
Auto-completion is a useful way to avoid duplication of similar words and phrases. Type a few letters of the tag you wish to enter and wait a few seconds to see if there already exists a tag in the system describing the concept.
Encourage the usage of tags that are as specific as possible while still describing the content.
These concerns about discussion forums have some validity. Considerable academic research has been devoted to online communities and which activities encourage continued participation and which activities don't. Again, guidelines are just fine and the same governance that apply to other venues within the company will apply in this venue. But, a healthy community with an engaged and properly trained community manager will do a great job of policing its own participation.
Auto completion and ad hoc are the names of the game.
Modern social media collaboration tools are engineered to be put together as needed, and keeping an official taxonomy for communication can be burdensome and only impeded the process.
Guidelines for use are good to keep in the training manual, but adhering too closely to them can destroy the value in modern collaborative tools.
It sure sounds like a lot of work and effort, that's for sure. I'm not sure it's worth getting so technical and strict. While I agree things can get out of hand in the posting world, proper policing tools can prevent that. I was just worn out thinking about all that would need to go into this. It's well thought out, though.