Beware Using "Collaboration" as a blanket term for all of Enterprise 2.0 -- it is not a synonym

The choice of just the right words is of great importance to understanding, as philosophers remind us, and scholars fret over.  The naming of something has been known to be a sacred and magical act, from the Stone Age forward.   So the struggles with vocabulary and definition in our field are not just amusing mud wrestling over brand and trademark (think $$), they signal the most fundamental pursuit of meaning and application.

Andy McAfee of MIT Sloan first coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" in his seminal SMR article in 2006.    He has been shaping and sifting the field ever since, paying close attention to language, in his influential blog and now with the release of a new book.   Members of the 2.0 Council will soon find a copy of Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges (HBS Press) in their hand, if they do not have it already. (You can peek here.)

Gil Yehuda is another blogger and consultant in E-2.0 who writes on the importance of using the right words, native to your audience, to create shared understanding (and influence clients) in this space.

Cisco Systems has adopted the term "Collaboration" to stand for what we call Enterprise 2.0, i.e. the sum of

• wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and other tools 
• practical human activities they enable
• two-way content creation & publication
• broad meritocratic participation 
• all delivering business value through the speed, simplicity, ubiquity of the modern internal network    

Cisco has published a thoughtful glossy [free download] brochure offering an outline framework for firms to customize their own design and deployment.  

Why choose "Collaboration" to stand for E-2.0 ?  

Presumably because "collaboration"

• sounds less geeky than E-2.0
• is not a neo-logism
• carries a raft of positive connotations [productivity] to business ears
• works well as a marketing and PR image
• avoids the "social" label, which we would all do well to ditch in speaking with our management, as Andy McAfee points out

We do not need to fear an extended theological dispute over terminology.  Practitioners won't spare the time.  It does seem necessary, however, to put a few stakes in the ground for 2.o Council deliberations.  It helps confirm we know what we are talking about.   In so doing we may or may not delineate some boundaries and sketch use cases of 2.0 in general.

Proposal: When we are speaking with (a) our mothers; (b) small children; and (c) corporate managers, we follow Cisco and use "collaboration" to mean Enterprise 2.0.    At some cost in precision, we gain a lot of reach, brevity and goodwill.   

ergo >>> When facing outward only, use "Collaboration."

On the other hand, when specialists and advocates of 2.0 are meeting with one another, we can and should aspire to more clarity and nuance.   There are several verbs / phrases we might choose that do not carry the meaning of collaboration ("working together on a common task").   See [free download] Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence, by MIT Prof. Tom Malone, Rob Laubacher, Chrys Dellarocas.  

Inside what we think of as 2.0, for example, but outside of collaboration, you might be 

• building collective intelligence by aggregation (no other human in the loop)
• lurking and extracting, one-sided only, when the pieces (mostly) are independent
• retrieving persistent copy of someone else's prior collaboration
  (the info donor / expert still does not know you exist)
• converting weak ties to informal networks in anticipation of future collaboration
• participating in a contest to solve a problem  (i.e. competing, not cooperating)
• joining Linked-In as a lark, in vague hope it might pay dividends someday
• writing a blog when no one reads it
• tagging content incorrectly, reducing the collective intelligence on our planet
• selling your car, or Where-to-go-for-drinks-Friday
• voting in a prediction market (does collaboration hinge on intent?)
• voting inappropriately in a market, as a goof, to sabotage the result

ergo >>> With peers, let's NOT default to "Collaboration"

Does this suggested dual-track language make sense?  Can you be said to be collaborating with someone else, when you don't know you are?  When you are competing with them? What of emergent knowledge, e.g. from prediction markets, without specific intention?  Does the word "social" have uniformly bad vibes in your hierarchy?   Are there other actions that fall under Enterprise 2.0 that should be distinguished from "collaboration" in your view?    Leave a comment.