Sooner or later if you get involved in social media, or knowledge management, you'll get involved in the great taxonomy debate -- how do you set up categories so people will find things?
I think I've finessed the problem, but it will take a few months or so to see if I was right.
And perhaps it's one of those problems that just doesn't have an easy answer ...
The Taxonomy Instinct
Somewhere in our genome must the be trait to categorize and organize things. We do it to plants, people, economies, books, etc. - wherever there are multiples of a thing, we feel the instinctive need to wade in and set up some nice neat categories so everything can be found.
We inherently dislike things that aren't neatly labelled the way we'd like them to be.
Now, I have always been one to challenge conventional thinking. And as we approached a potential social media world of hundreds of communities and thousands of voices, the urge to predictably categorize our world ahead of its creation became a matter of passionate discussion.
The Argument For A Heirarchical Taxonomy
It's not hard to marshall powerful arguments in favor of creating a heirarchical taxonomy ahead of communitiy development.
People will need to navigate and find things -- how will they do so without some sort of categorization scheme? They expect some sort of familiar navigation model.
We want ownership of communities -- why not have them be owned by the functional organizations that create them?
We were heading down a road where our community organizational model would end up looking pretty much like an organizational chart.
Even the test sandbox provided by Jive Software around Clearspace showed different functional organizations (marketing, HR, sales), each with their own community space.
I felt that we were headed for a slippery slope, and fought back with some arguments of my own.
The Argument Against A Heirachical Taxonomy
Taxonomies aren't the only way to find things. As a matter of fact, it is my belief that people more often find things other ways.
Search, for example. Or someone you know sends you a link.
Going a bit farther, Clearspace supported a sophisticated tagging model. If we could get people to use the feature, it looked like a far better way to find things.
I saw a world where most communities and spaces were pretty flat in the heirarchy. The communities hopefully had interesting names that might twig your interest. People found them either by browsing through a long list, or searching, or -- more likely -- someone they know said "check this out!".
Organizing communities by corporate function meant that you'd be more likely to have small, isolated communities that didn't span multiple organizations and boundaries. Not an issue in a small company, but a real issue in a bigger company with tens of thousands of people and hundreds of organizational units.
I call it the Barnes and Noble effect. Because Barnes and Noble has distinct categories for the types of books it offers (e.g. business, self-help, romance, etc.) authors end up writing books for specific categories.
The classification system itself can very subtly and powerfully affect the outcome of how things behave beneath it. Lots of examples of this when you start looking for it.
And I didn't want that particular effect playing out here.
The Dynamic Nature Of Communities
I think it's worth pointing out the inherent futility of pre-ordaining what types of communities will be built.
We've made it really easy for anyone to start an informal discussion or community. This means we're gonna have lots of them. I'm looking forward to being surprised at the types of communities that spring up.
Some will thrive. Some won't. Some will spring into existence, passionately flame around a hot topic, and quiesce once the challenge has been solved, and people move on.
All part of the natural ecology of social media environments.
Who are we to pre-ordain what types of things grow? It's the difference between a garden and a meadow. A garden has weeds, a meadow doesn't.
What We Ended Up Doing
I used a bit of my perogative to force a very simple top-level schema.
The first community space anyone sees is "Getting Started". Lots of new users, we want them to go there first.
The second community space is 'Active Communities'. The message is clear -- go here to look at a linear list of communities that are up and running. I think the expectations here are pretty clear.
The third space is "Under Development". I felt we needed a sandbox where prospective community developers could build their spaces, configure, add content, etc. before going "live" and promoting their community to new members.
The fourth space is "Archived Communities". At some point, activity in a space tails off, but you don't want to delete anything. At the same time, you don't want people wandering in and contributing if there's no one there. So everything in this space has the write permissions turned off -- it's still accessible and referenceable -- but no comments, edits or discussions.
And, of course, the fifth space is "Feedback' -- what do people think, what do they want, etc.
Now, all of this is predicated on some fundamental (but essential) primitives in the Clearspace tool.
You can move a sub-space from one parent to another, e.g. from "Under Development" to "Active Communities" to "Archived Communites" following a normal lifecycle.
You can create a new parent space, and move various spaces underneath it as new children. If you end up with a bunch of communities that are related, you can spot that, and create a new node in the taxonomy in about 30 seconds.
And, if a community needs to split into sub-communities, that's achievable as well -- although someone has to manually go through and parse the content, explicitly moving it to different places.
One feature that I see we're going to need is to have a single piece of content showing up in multiple spaces. Right now, a content object (doc, blog, discussion, etc.) can show up in one and only one space. Well, that's going to be a bit limiting going forward.
And Then There's Tagging
The wild bet here is tagging. Clearspace supports a suprisingly sophisticated (yet elegant) tagging function.
Having everyone throw a bunch of tags on the content they create (or the content they edit) is intuitively the right way to go here. I can't prove it, I just know it.
Popular tags get used more often -- it's a self-reinforcing system that -- hopefully -- will result in a sort of self-emergent enterprise vocabulary. Not by edict -- by consensus.
The trick will be to get people to tag (think nagging) and to use tags to find things. I'll let you know how that one goes ;-)
And On A Final Note
I've been involved in various classification and taxonomy efforts before in different subject domains.
They haven't been fun, and they've always been intellectually unsatisfying. It's almost like we're arrogantly imposing order on something that's inherently chaotic.
It's really hard when you get to look at things that already exist. It's darn near impossible when the things you're trying to categorize haven't been created yet.
And I didn't want to spend days/weeks/months on a philisophical debate that was likely to end up with the wrong result, produce unwanted behaviors, and not create much value in the process.
So, how will you finesse the taxonomy debate when it comes up?
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