In collaborative networks, forums and wikis, actual production only relies on a small percentage of users. This is confirmed in a business environment in a post from the Harvard Business Review ‘Collaborative Overload‘: “In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees“.
The reasons are multiple:
- Collaborative systems act as complex systems and hence, contribution follow a ‘long tail’ curve: major contributors really produce a large part of the value (however the aggregated value of the contributions of all the others should not be neglected)
- Most users generate interactions of low value to the community
- Most users are swamped by daily urgencies and do not have the time to do longer term contributions.
This small percentage has an interesting implication when it comes to organizations’ internal collaborative networks – they can only work if there is a sufficient number of potential users so that the core group of 3-5% of users generating most of the value is large enough. That is why a minimum of a few hundred to a few thousand potential users is necessary for successful internal collaborative networks.
The entire HBR’s paper is quite an interesting read as it focuses on the emotional drain for the key collaboration contributors and the fact that their contribution is often not recognized enough.
