This a very early draft of the introduction to Tags: Living In A Virtual World. I use this blog as a notebook for drafts, so you can provide me with feedback in an early stage. Comments are, as always, appreciated.
If you are a Project Manager that operates for a short period of time in a foreign organization, with a team you don’t know, in a domain you would not know how to spell, I would say you have some challenges.
Think about this Project Manager as a person in a huge network of interacting people. The PM can interact only with a few of them (his team, the stakeholders). The stakeholders interact also with others. People the PM knows, but more likely with people invisible to the Project Manager.
Because of the size of the network, because of limited visibility on the network, because of the complexity of the network, the PM is getting partial information, always.
For the same reasons the PM has only partial influence. He cannot interact with “everyone”. He has no “power” over everyone.
How do you get your job done?
The same problems arise when you operate on the internet. Lots of people you don’t know, huge amount of partial information. By looking at how this works in the virtual space, we get insights that can guide us in our projects.
Well, on the Net it’s all about Tags. And the things people think they represent.
Tags. Yes, Tags!
People can catalog almost everything on the Internet. You can add words to photos on Flickr that describe the picture. At Amazon, users can put labels on the products, labels they associate with the object. It’s called “tagging”.
Users from the bookmarking site Delicious add tags to the webpages they find interesting. If they put “project management” and “best article ever” to one of my webpages I’ll be delighted. If their tag reads “this sucks”, well, that sucks.
Image by dominiekth.
Tags are the little labels we put on everything on the web. There is no overall top down structure. Everybody can add tags. The tags can be any word or couple of words. Whatever your association is, it’s your tag.
A collection of tags describes a picture, book, products or blogger in a short and effective way. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or false. It’s about the perception of community.
After three years creating The Project Shrink, blog, podcast and persona, that’s how I view living online: a struggle with tags.
On Twitter I exchange short messages with other Project Managers. We have a secret handshake. Every message contains the letters PMOT, which stands for Project Managers On Twitter. By using these letters, you label yourself as a PM. And a cool one. One that is On Twitter.
The blog Project Shrink started out about “Project Management”. But I experienced that under that label humans don’t play a role. (At least, that’s what I’m told.) In “general management”: yes. In “human resourcing”: yes.
So I adopted “Project Leadership”. Now that is a lovely area in which you can throw any human topic you can imagine. The drawback is, nobody really knows what it is exactly. It may be a safe tag, but it’s not an effective one.
If you use a tag, you want it to be clear. You use a word, a word that means something to you. Agile approaches are getting more and more in fashion. Therefor more and more approaches are getting the label “agile”. To piggyback on the success.
Brian Marick believed Agile is being dumbed down. So he created Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. Just to be sure no one would take that name and create it into something else. I am pretty sure that this tag wasn’t taken already.
Tags, or labels, are the social currency in the virtual world.
It’s the stuff we want to collect, get rid off or give online. This is not typical for online interactions. Labeling is a concept from sociology. According to Wikipedia “… is (sociology) the study of the social lives of humans, groups, and societies, sometimes defined as the study of social interactions.”
Online. Offline. Society. Project. Doesn’t matter. The kicker in the virtual space is, you actually use real tags. We see them. We use them as keywords in our filters. We use them in our one sentence pitch on LinkedIn. But still. Always the same principles. It’s about group affiliation and identity.
During your life you are a member of a lot of social groups, by default, by choice or by force. I am a Dutch white male, member of a no-child double income household, Project Manager, author and web aficionado, to name just a few of my own treats. The Dutch white male is something that I am by birth, by default. All other affiliations are more or less done by choice.
The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the whole of society, it determines our identity. Actually, we have more than one identity. We can choose, we can switch depending on the situation. I like to see myself as a blogger and writer. Within the professional world I emphasize the software project manager affiliation. You have been dealt a lot of memberships, you can emphasize or down play each affiliation to create your identity.
As an identity is how we see ourselves within the ultimate large group of humans, it not something that can be seen on an individual level. It is a group thing. Without groups, the whole concept of identity wouldn’t make sense. We are shaping identities by combining three mechanisms: categorization, identification and comparison [Wikipedia]. Although broadminded people like to think they do not put everyone in boxes, everyone does.
We always put people in categories, we label them. This is done by looking for signs that we associate with a certain group. These signs are the mentioned use of icons, rituals or speak. To be able to associate yourself with a group, we first have to divide society into groups. Identification is the part where you affiliate yourself with a group.
The affiliation is done by taken on the social groups norms and other aspects which are used by humans to label an individual to a category. With the identification you label yourself to the group. To be able to do this, you take on the marks that cause the label. Comparison is looking for differences between groups. With the group affiliation you create your identity, your place in society. For this to work you are also indicating where you are not standing. It is always a comparison between groups.
A Short Writing Project: Tags.
It has been three years already since I launched The Project Shrink. I wanted to see if basic sociology could help me understand problems in projects. As DeMarco and Lister put it in their classic “Peopleware”: “The major problems of our work are not as much technological as sociological in nature.” So, it only makes sense to look at the social sciences.
Writing, discussing, interviewing and being active online provided me with some great experiences. The information and knowledge I acquired from running The Project Shrink form the basis of a small book I am working on: Tags (working title).
The information is applicable to offline situations. The information is incredible relevant for running virtual projects.
The table of contents:
1. Augmented Conversations
2. Trusting People You Don’t Know
3. What’s Your Beef?
4. Living In Networks: If You Build It, They Will Come
5. Transparency: Turning History Into Tags
6. What Happens If You Only See A Part Of Your Network?
7. Do Introverts Rule The Tag Game?
8. Why Your Company Should Help You Tag
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by DaveG253: Projectshrink: #pmot Tags: Sociology In A Virtual World http://bit.ly/c92eTi...
“Without groups, the whole concept of identity wouldn’t make sense”… great idea but its true as well that we cant put everyone in a box.
Hi Kman, true. But the idea is more that we put people in multiple boxes, or exclude them from boxes. To keep with the metaphor. The selection of boxes you are in AND the selection of boxes you are not in make the identity.
I hope I didn’t confuse too much
Interesting …
I can buy into part of what you describe, but have difficulty with the static nature of tags. We are significantly defined, and determined, by the communities which we join and in which we find ourselves. Our community and its “tools” (in a Vygotskian sense) are essential to both language and cognition. G.H.Mead, in North America, mapped this territory almost a century ago, as did Lev Vygotsky in the early USSR.
A tag may help to situate an issue or an individual against a community, but the tag and the community are not identical. The virtual challenge that I see is that online communities (especially ones defined by a tag) lack “depth”. In a physical, real community, I can turn to members of my community on a range of issues, concerns, and opportunities. Virtual communities are often focused on a particular issue or concern. They don’t provide the multi-dimensional support that we need from our communities.
Further, community is not something that can be captured in a static representation. It’s a dynamic entity with a history and a future that strongly colours the reality of community membership. Tags strip out the dynamic nature, and capture only an aspect of a (thin) virtual community. As human beings, we need more.
My $0.02.
Robert Fabian
Yes it’s true that we cannot put everyone in a box. However, i always believed that if you don’t have time to coach and encourage your team, at the end, you will still never have time to coach and encourage your team members. I believed that technical leads that is very familiar with the domain of the project should always be proactive in helping his PM so that his PM is able to know how to plan and what are are the critical road block to clear
Hi Robert,
Thanks for your opinion. Appreciated. You are right in the dynamic nature of the communities. I don’t have a static view of tags, but I will think about making this more clear/obvious etc. And many, many thanks for the references.
Regards,
Bas
Hi Moses,
I totally agree.
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