A Breakthrough In Taxonomy?

Sorry, I haven't posted in a while.  Not only have I been busy on other stuff, there hasn't been that much new and exciting to report on our internal initiatives.

User count continues to grow, new communites spring up, new sources of business value are identified and celebrated -- it's all good, there's just nothing really "new" to talk about.

Until now.

The Great Taxonomy Debate

As I wrote about a while ago, one of the great philisophical discussions that we wrestled with early on was the idea of a taxonomy -- a nice, orderly (and externally imposed) schema to help people find things.

On one side of the debate (we'll call them the traditionalists), there were sound arguments about how messy, chaotic environments were off-putting to new users -- and we wanted people to climb on board and enjoy the experience.  People expected some sort of categorization scheme -- if we didn't meet those expectations, bad things would happen.

On the other side of the debate (we'll call them the emergents), there were sound arguments that attempting to categorize something that was spontaneous, organic and user-driven was an exercise in corporate futility, to say the least.  The high-value conversations were precisely the ones that didn't fit neatly into a traditional approach.

If you remember the story, I exercised my perogative here, and sided with the latter crew.  But, I said, should someone propose -- at some time in the future -- an approach to taxonomy that made sense and reflected how people actually thought of the environment (rather than an external framework imposed), I'd be open to the idea.

No taxonomies it was -- from when we got started in September 2007, until mid April 2008. 

But, surprisingly, a few members of the team came up with an approach that might actually work!

What Happened

Simply put, someone decided to think outside the box.

Usually, when someone sits down to create a taxonomy, they start with an org chart, or a price book, or some similar existing construct.  Not to be indelicate, but these approaches really, really suck in my book.

So, as a result, we ended up with close to a hundred overlapping, chaotic communities of different sorts.

Then someone came up with the idea of "verbs" rather than "nouns".

I don't know whether it was Jamie, or Chris, or both of them together, but they sketched out a simple proposal that focused on the actions, rather than the objects.

We ended up with proposed categories such as "building" (all the conversations at EMC around building stuff, regardless of what you're building, or who's doing the building), "selling" (all the conversations around selling stuff, regardless of what you're selling, who you're selling it to, and who's doing the selling), "supporting", "marketing" and so on.

Add a few more categories, like "working" (all the work-related discussions), "living" (all the stuff we do outside of work), "researching", "partnering", "using" and a few others, and -- voila! -- it started to make sense to me.

Why I Think This Is A Better Approach

For the first time, I could look at all the communities, and with a handful of categories, I could get a first-order approximation of what all the discussions were all about -- expressed as a verb, not as a bounded noun or object.

I don't know why, but my brain immediately wrapped around this style of taxomony as inherently more valuable than others.

So, we're going to give it a try.  Clearspace lets us drag and drop communities into any subspace, so implementing it will be tedious, but not especially hard.

For the first time, I'm up for the idea of a taxonomy.

But, of course, I need to throw in a few disclaimers ...

First, we're targeting the "big conversation" -- one that (ideally) spans the entire company.  If we were just using this in an engineering group, or a services group, etc. I don't know if this would be the right approach.

Second, we stood back and watched the garden grow for a while before it made sense that this was the right direction to go.  Had we tried on Day One to drive it in this direction, I"m not sure that it would have worked.  For example, I'm imagining a big, empty hierarchy with no discussions, but having the nice labels of "building", "partnering", etc.  I don't think people would have known what to make of it all.

Third, we haven't really gone to our community yet and got their feedback on this whole idea.  I'm worried that they've gotten accustomed to the chaos we've created, and -- well -- may actually prefer it!

We'll know in a few weeks -- I'll keep you posted.

Comments

[Xavier]

That's a great idea!

I does make a lot of sense ...

However, the big drawback of taxonomies, in my opinion, is that they allways end up a few tags short ... and having to go through the admin to get a new tag is allways a hassle and a hurdle ...

But, you could keep a folksonomy system, with a recommendation to use verbs only ....

I'll keep that in mind while working on the setting up of our company wiki ...

Thanks for the tip!

[KenF]

Chuck, it sounds like you're going through some growing pains (small community --> big city) and now you're ready to add the district/county level (Selling District, etc). Your communities probably won't care one way or another as long as you don't mess with their "identity". It will be the new lurkers that will have an opinion since they are the ones trying to navigate the long list of communities.

When you look at an electronics retail site like Best Buy, for example, they have basically organized their products by verbs as well (TVs/Video=Looking, Audio=Listening, Cameras=Filming, Phones=Talking, Games=Playing, etc.) so it's a familiar schema your users will probably accept as a part of the growing process.

The Best Buy site, however, still feels 1.0-ish and your community list situation seems to be begging for a more visual, 2.0-ish solution. Maybe a tag-cloud or map-like approach where larger communities stand out, communities with common members are grouped close to each other, fast-moving communities are color-coded, and you can mouse over any community to get a pop-up box description.

If this plug-in existed, you might be able to skip the taxonomy issue completely.

[Rich]

you probably should consider a taxonomy driven folksonomy. provide some focus, some guidance, some template...but give people the ability to tag it themselves and change it over time.