The new and improved Orglines.com debuted this week at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco, where we had the opportunity to demo and discuss Orglines with conference attendees. The response was overwhelmingly positive, both from potential users and from potential partners, and we look forward to continuing to build he community and improve our service.
Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, edited by SSRC Program Director Joe Karaganis, explores digital technologies that are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms. Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and the other new architectures of agency and control. We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them. Advancing that account is the goal of this volume.
The articles on control architectures are of particular interest: a fundamental goal of Orglines is to create regulated workforce communities where the ability the members to participate is not diminished.
Mike Gotta of Collaborative Thinking lays out from interesting thoughts in a recent post about what it might take to make social networking services useful in a business context. I think he’s on the right track. What sets Orglines apart from other social networking systems is the recognition that people in organizations have multiple roles that interact with different “networks” in different contexts. Orglines makes it easy for users to take on a different personae for each role, thus dividing their activities by context.
Orglines was formed in part from a desire to help organizations operate better by clarifying roles, responsibilities, and relationships carried by their members. To this end, Orglines adopts a precise view of the elemental building blocks from which organizational structures are built.
Org Charts are traditionally shown as trees with each node representing a unique position and each arc representing a reporting relationship between two positions. This format clearly shows which positions are defined for an organization as a whole and how those positions relate to one another.
One can also think about the structure of an organization in terms of the way it is subdivided into divisions, departments, sections, groups, teams, etc… These labels (e.g. “division”) are completely arbitrary in the sense that they enjoy no standard definition or usage in today’s organizations. A “group” can be either the smallest unit of an organization (e.g. “QA Group”) or one of the largest (e.g. “Tata Automotive Group”). What is important, though, is that organizations are divided into smaller and smaller units, each of which has an identity and a specific function.
We often think of these subdivisions as groups of people. (Orglines also calls these subdivisions ‘organizations’. i.e.
organizations are made up of smaller organizations, which are in turn made of smaller organizations, each of which can contain any number of positions. For clarity, I will use the term ‘subdivision‘ here to refer to any organization that is part of a larger organization.)
However a subdivision can also be thought of as a partitioning of goals and accountability. Each subdivision — as a whole — has its own role to play, and while its role may be intricately coordinated with other subdivisions (we place a high value on cooperation and teamwork!), roles and responsibilities are not shared across subdivisions. Therefore, belonging to a subdivision means not only being a member of a group, but also sharing a commitment
to fulfilling the goals of that group and being accountable (along with other members) for the fulfillment of those goals.
Both the “hierarchy of positions” view and the “subdivision of goals and accountability” view of organizations are important and useful. Luckily, it turns out that there is (in organizations that are not broken) an exact correspondence between the two. Namely, for each position, there is exactly one subdivision. Although, as mentioned previously, we normally think about an organization as a group of people, from the “subdivision of goals and accountability” point of view, there is only one position in each subdivision whose scope of accountability is the same as the subdivision itself: the supervisor (every other position in that subdivision carries only a portion of the responsibility for the full scope).
Therefore, each subdivision defines the scope of accountability for a supervisor position, and vice versa. In other words, position and subdivision (or “organization”) are two sides of the same coin.
The fundamental building block of an organization model in Orglines is the “position”, which incorporates details about both the scope defined by that position and the actor who anchors it.
Orglines users create a “position” for each context in which they operate, giving the job title and description for that position, and identifying reporting reporting relationships that they have in that position (e.g. “I report to Bob, and Frank reports to me.”)
Note that once we have a position defined for each node in the tree (or block on the subdivision diagram) then we have everything we need to build up a complete picture of the organization: positions, job descriptions, reporting relationships, and breakdown of organizational goals.
Phil Wolff of Skype Journal outlines a model of social networking capabilities using the OSI Basic Reference Model as an analogue.
I find it interesting that social meta-data (tags, comments, ratings) are left out. Have you seen other useful resources for understanding the underpinnings of social media?
A lot of information on the web lacks contextual information we need in order to judge its truthiness. If someone says something to us, we know that person’s identity. Our knowledge of that person’s credibility and expertise on the subject is part of the context that helps us interpret what we hear. If document is printed and distributed, what we know about the distributor, and how the item was delivered, contributes to our understanding of the force of the information contained therein.
Unfortunately, a great deal of information that is published on the web has less contextual information, which leaves us less able to judge its validity with confidence.
Social features, such as community editing, commentary, social bookmarking, and usefulness ratings are beginning to address this but there is still further that we can go.
For example many (many!) blog posts are published without the name of the author or that date of publication. The latter is especially frustrating in the tech world, since information tends to decay so rapidly.
Orglines “agreements” are aimed at exactly this problem in two important ways: first, by structuring the process of negotiating certain kinds of statements, and second by exposing contextual information that others can use to judge the validity of those statements at any point in time.
How do you judge information on the web? What would you like to see?
“Dotted Line” reporting — the practice of representing multiple reporting as additional accountabilities for a single position with a dotted line on an org chart — is a bad idea. Here’s why:
Not that multiple reporting is bad. Multiple reporting — being accountable to different people for different aspects of our jobs — is an inescapable fact of life in modern organizations. What is bad is failing to identify which responsibilities go with which reporting relationships.
A better practice is to define two positions, one each each reporting relationship, and add details to specify which aspects of your job are overseen by which supervisor.
For example, suppose you work in a project-oriented company where at any given time you might be assigned to several different projects, as in addition to reporting to a line manager. Let’s say you are assigned to Project X. You would have two Orglines positions: one reporting to your line manager, and another reporting to the project manager.
Taking the time to specify each position and relationship separately may help you clarify your own understanding of the multiple roles you fulfill at work, as well as uncovering ambiguities and possible conflicts that can lead to frustration and disappointing results.
In contrast, when we use dotted lines, the ambiguities and possible conflicts are not only allowed to persist, but are actually entrenched!
So, avoid dotted lines at all cost. Instead, define your orglines, and get more stuff done.
“Activity streaming” and “life streaming” are terms used to describe an RSS aggregation technique used to gather and publish updates from all over the web that are relevant to a specific person.  Plaxo Pulse is a leading example, providing users with aggregated updates on all their contacts.
These activity streaming services currently allow you to source updates from most major consumer-oriented social networking sites like Twiter, Flickr, Facebook, and major blogs.  These are great for keeping track of friends, but are of limited use for keeping up to date on what’s happening at work.
Orglines Activity Streams will make it possible to associate feeds not just with people, but also with any positions or organizations (team, group, department, committee, company, etc.) and to gather updates from any business application.
Just one more way to help use knowledge about your organization to filter and route information and help you get things done.
Welcome to the Orglines blog about social networking and Enterprise 2.0.
Orglines aims to help organizations work better using social networking and web 2.0 technologies. At the center of both social networking and web 2.0 is a transfer of control away from central authorities to the citizens who make up a community. Sometimes described as “crowd-sourcing” or capturing the “wisdom of crowds”, the resulting marketplace of ideas can be more efficient at gathering, sorting, prioritizing, and refreshing information than any centralized middleman. Wikipedia is a prime example of the power of such communities.
Orglines.com will engage citizens to create org charts by contributing what they know about their organizations better than anyone else: their own titles, job descriptions, and reporting relationships in the form of semantic connections to their co-workers, like “friends” on Facebook, but work-related and context-aware. The “big picture” of an organization’s actual structure can be then be constructed from these verifiable facts.
It turns out that these “company-communities” are useful beyond just creating orgcharts, and that’s where the real fun begins.
We’re working hard to get the site ready for a private beta this spring. Meanwhile, you can follow our progress and participate in the conversation here.
Let us know what you think!