Posted by Anonymous on October 5, 2014 at 2:21pm
In The Networked Enterprise: Competing for the Future Through Virtual Enterprise Networks the author Ken Thompson outlines the following working groups. What do you think of this approach? How could they be implemented? Is paid-subscription the only way to discourage freeloading and enable private conversations? Discuss!
- Board - The board consists of representatives of all companies and sponsoring organisations. The board is responsible for overall network governance and strategic decision making.
- Management - This group is for discussing operational issues.
- Business and Market Development - Marketing the network to prospective customers. Defining, developing and researching the best target sectors, collaborative offers and identifying opportunities.
- Network Development and Governance - This group is for developing the network goals, objectives, ground rules, roles, working practices and technology and process infrastructures.
- Member and Capability Development - This group is for increasing membership and member capabilities. Identifying, attracting and inducting new members.
- Campaign and Bid Development - Groups of members form teams around specific opportunities to engage prospective customers and make collaborative bids. This group is the launchpad for those sub groups.
- New Product Development - Groups of members form teams around specific new product development opportunities and research projects. This group is the launchpad for those sub groups.
- Project Management - Groups of members form teams to manage the execution of project contracts won by the campaign and bid development teams and also internal projects. This group is the launchpad for those sub groups.
note: I just bought the domain name 'smallscaledrupal.club' - will be good to have something a bit more design-oriented to be able to point people to as opposed to just this group.
Comments
Hi Steve, I guess "Campaign
Hi Steve, I guess "Campaign and Bid Development" could be a nice working group environment for freelancers. But the question of freeloaders and quality insurance remains.
Freeloaders & QA
Hi Boris,
Two good points here but different issues - QA I believe is part of your processes as a business. With regards to the freeloaders side, that's why I think private groups would be needed. The presentation I linked to re VENs (here's the PDF version) author Ken Thompson explains as follows:
The associate member area I see as where we are now - open, free to join, free to freeload, etc.
Invite only / pseudonymous?
The kind of conversations I'm looking for wouldn't be so much private (and certainly not under NDA) as rather:
These are where I see two clear gaps in existing online conversations: LinkedIn is completely deluged with recruiters, and conversation suffers there; and when I was considering going freelance, there was nowhere I could chat about it, in a Drupal context, that wasn't tied to my account with my real name on it.
I guess what I'm proposing in the first instance is a kind of support/advice network, which I don't see represented in the list up there. But if it has the option of multiple rooms - maybe some of them private - then there's certainly the option of supporting some of those other types of network as mentioned.
Also, I think my two modest criteria are something that, if g.d.o could somehow support them (even if it doesn't yet, how do we bring that about?) then it could provide a useful resource without substantial financial outlay on our part, or a need for subscriptions or payments.
NDAs suck!
Completely agree re NDAs! I take Ken's book as more of a base model to observe - i.e. it's worked elsewhere but needs to be adapted a) out of the 80s ;) and b) to how the Drupal community works.
I also agree with the invite-only, it's the conclusion I've come to lately about how to get out of the chicken-and-egg situation - we discuss processes on here and those who want to set up their own invite-only networks.
I wasn't too sure about pseudonyms when I first read your reply, but the more I think about it the more genius I think it is - ATEOTD part of the whole point of this process is to make it more about the output as a whole than particular individuals or companies. I'd sure like to try working under a pseudonym cos I'm sure lots are put off by 'stevepurkiss' stuff, but I'm sure they'd work it out pretty soon lol.
Clients are also not used to buying from unknown quantities so smaller groups better - works well for people like Agile Collective, then link up the groups. Or something like that, sales is what makes it work ateotd!
Pseudonymity needn't be permanent
An option might be for a user to only submit in a pseudonymous mode for a brief period, when they need to (e.g. comments get submitted as "anonymous" only as long as there's a flag on the user's profile.) So only certain discussions need be made pseudonymously. I wouldn't see it as a condition of any community so much as a handy option for when people need it, for all sorts of reasons.