Working In The Open

Kevin Gamble has an excellent post Enterprise 2.0– working in the open:

A week doesn’t go by where I don’t hear from some administrative group who wants to work in a wiki, but wants their work to be private. When this happens I almost always tell them, “Then a wiki isn’t for you. If you want to collaborate with a small group where no one else can see it use Google Docs.” It’s amazingly common for people to want to work in a private little sandbox until they have everything perfect and then reveal it to the world. The trouble is, this almost entirely eliminates the opportunities for collaboration because people can’t see the content until it’s completed. What’s the value in reviewing and adding to a document that the author already thinks is done?

If you really want to collaborate you need more than just new tools, you need new attitudes. You need to put aside the fear of being wrong or looking incompetent by publishing too early and have some confidence in yourself and your colleagues to find and highlight the good content and strip away the bad. It’s not an easy change to make because it requires trust and understanding between you and your colleagues, but it’s the only way to work better together.