Those of you who have been wanting to get involved in more senior management decisions for your org might be heartened by a recent NY Times article called Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas.
A quote from the article:
According to Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, the computer book publisher, and an evangelist for open source technologies, creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling “architecture of participation.” That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products?
The article makes an interesting leap from the original context of the architecture of participation (usually found in OSS development) to that of the management sphere. Substitiute companies with non-profits and what do you end up with? Is this a version of Nonprofit 2.0 that we’re looking at? What would a nonprofit look like with a robust internal forum for ideas and problem solving?
One thing that wasn’t described in the article was how technology can be used to level the playing field by giving the most busy employees a chance to respond asynchronously and by decontextualizing the hierarchy that usually occurs in committee meetings. Basically, anyone’s message can look just as “good” as anyone else’s regardless of their particular position in the organization.
Here’s an open question to non-profit IT directors… What kind of technology would best create an architecture of participation? E-mail lists? An intranet news forum? Instant messaging?
Confessions
My org has an informal architecture of participation (but no technology behind it) and I’ve been helping to speed it up by putting them on a fast-track implementation. We have a wonderful internal leadership group that had its ideas neglected for some time by senior management but their labor has not been forgotten. We’ll be implementing a volunteer management system because of their early work. I think the architecture of participation is dependent on how quickly management will steer in the direction of the participants. If the participants don’t feel their ideas have been empowered by a responsive management, this new architecture won’t work.
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