The Culture of Collaboration

Kaltura and Wikimedia Enable Collaborative Video Creation

Video is by no means a requirement for collaboration, but its role is expanding.

When I reported for television stations early in my career, getting a story on the air was—at its best—a truly collaborative effort. Photographers, producers, assignment editors and reporters worked in concert to produce compelling stories. In the editing room, a photographer and I would sit elbow-to-elbow choosing shots, integrating natural sound, and basically creating a visual story.

Now we’re in a global virtual editing room in which people can edit and produce videos collaboratively regardless of geography. Kaltura is open sourcing its collaborative video making software and is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation. The idea is to bring rich media collaboration to Wikipedia and other wiki web sites. You can check out the beta here. The move combines and extends two collaborative trends: sharing user-generated video and wiki-based collaborative text writing and editing.

Think of the possibilities. People across the world can capture historic moments and shape history collaboratively through video. People can collaboratively create travel videos as an alterative to the tourism board videos. And in education, the opportunities are limitless. Students can co-create animated content and videos about everything from political science to parapsychology or from anatomy to anthropology.

In the business realm, companies can generate brand excitement and customer interaction and input by inviting people to co-create videos on motorcycles, hot tubs, books, clothing, skiing…you name it. Within the enterprise, organizations can enhance wikis with rich media. Doing research on a previous product launch? View the collaborative video that your colleagues produced. Taking a business trip to the Mumbai office? View collaborative video on the facility, the local leadership and local events.

As collaborative and compelling as video wikis (should we call them vikis?) are, how about taking them a step further? The next step would be the ability to collaborate in a real-time mode in which we can interact over voice or video over IP while simultaneously editing and producing videos? Leading digital effects companies in the film industry are already creating value through collaborative, real-time video production using telepresence and videoconferencing. But there are broader possibilities for real-time, consumer-generated video content. After a candidate holds a rally, political junkies who shot video could connect through instant messaging, escalate to VOIP interaction and produce a video on the fly. In the enterprise, people throughout an organization along with business partners could capture a product roll-out globally and produce and publish a video in real-time.

Integrating Kaltura’s technology with wikis will immediately create broad-scale asynchronous collaborative video editing and production. And the move is a significant step towards real-time collaborative video creation. The possibilities are limitless in that anybody with Web access can participate.

Too Old to Collaborate?

I was recently briefing senior leaders of a large global enterprise that wants to become more collaborative. They described a common observation: some younger team members are far more collaborative than their older colleagues. The age question constantly comes up—either directly or indirectly—whether I’m briefing senior leaders, working in the trenches of organizations, or speaking to groups. So, it’s time to devote some of this space to exploring age and collaboration.

Collaboration is by no means new. However, broad consciousness for collaboration and effective tools to support collaborative culture are relatively recent. Collaboration has been a critical success factor for centuries in everything from fighting wars to writing songs. Also, some venerable organizations were built with a collaborative culture from the ground up. The Mayo Clinic is a great example. At the turn of the last century, Mayo was more collaborative than most companies are today. For the first decade, the Mayo brothers performed surgery together, each doctor trading off as the other’s first assistant. The Mayos assembled a cross-functional team of doctors, laboratory experts, business people and communications specialists.

Since collaboration has been around for awhile, clearly there are plenty of older people who get collaboration. As a society, we must be careful in using the initiative du jour—whether it’s collaboration or something else—to divide people based on age. After all, how collaborative is that? Rather than using collaboration as an excuse to put older workers out to pasture, many organizations should consider how collaboration can unite generations of team members by breaking down barriers.

Many of the perceptions that older people don’t collaborate have more to do with tools than collaboration per se. People in their 20’s often prefer the immediacy of instant messaging over the relative formality of email, while many people in their 40’s have perceived IM as more of a “communicate with the kids” tool. Their perception is evolving, however, and many are embracing presence-enabled tools including IM, web conferencing and videoconferencing as ways to reach people across functions and regions, collaborate on the fly, and get things done.

There is also a perception that people in their 20’s know instinctively how to collaborate. This notion is often based on the perceived comfort level of younger people with collaborative tools. However, the assumption may preclude younger people from getting necessary training and participating in a culture shift towards collaboration.

Age is by no means the most significant obstacle to collaboration in organizations. Some larger issues are internal competition, star culture and unnecessary manifestations of hierarchy. And there are people who unnecessarily compete with colleagues across the age spectrum.

Focusing on age may short circuit collaboration initiatives by ostracizing older team members—people with knowledge, skills and perspective that cross-functional teams require. If we perceive that older team members are resisting collaborative culture, we must first analyze if the issue is collaboration itself or using collaboration tools. These issues involve different remedies, rewards and training approaches to help people, regardless of age, become more collaborative.

Sustainability Fuels Collaboration Consciousness

Both academia and business are realizing that the lack of collaboration can impede progress. Traditionally, university researchers compete for limited grant money, so there is little incentive to collaborate.

In a Christmas day story in The New York Times, Claudia H. Deutsch reported on several academic sustainability centers that focus on collaborating across disciplines. One is the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The article quotes Nabil Nasr, the institute’s director, as saying “the problem of sustainability cuts across economics, social elements, engineering, everything. It simply cannot be solved by one discipline, or even by coupling two disciplines.” Well said!

Now The Dow Chemical Company, through its foundation, is funding a Sustainable Products and Solutions Program at The Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business at The University of California-Berkeley. Dow is providing $10 million over the next five years and sending a Dow leader to Berkeley as an executive-in-residence. Part of his role is to recruit other industry partners to fund the program. What’s compelling about the sustainability program is that the Department of Chemistry is collaborating with the business school and the program will likely involve students and faculty from other disciplines. The bottom line is that environmental and sustainability concerns run deep enough and are so complex that they’re sparking collaboration among people who would otherwise do one of three things: compete with each other, ignore one another, or remain at odds with each other.

Urgency in the environmental realm is clearly driving collaboration across disciplines, but sustainability is by no means the only area in which universities and corporations should be applying collaborative principles, practices and processes. In the business realm…marketing should be collaborating with research and development, R&D should be collaborating with information technology, sales should be collaborating with the market research group, and so on. This should be happening asynchronously and in real time.