Social software & purposeful project collaboration

Stowe Boyd wrote in his insightful article
"Are You Ready for Social Software?" published in Darwin Magazine:

Social software allows us to create new social groupings and then new sorts of social conventions arise. ... And this new software will support David Weinberger's notion of enabling groups to form and self-organize rather than have structure or organization imposed.... Social software reflects the "juice" that arises from people's personal interactions. It's not about control, it's about co-evolution: people in personal contact, interacting towards their own ends, influencing each other. But there isn't a single clearly defined project, per se.

There might be not in the early stages of emergent group-formation processes but having no clearly defined project is neither a criteria of social software, nor of the many well-defined social, business, knowledge, and technology innovation initiatives, that it can enable.

Using social software, one can develop new types of enterprise project that scale well up and down. It's true that the features of many tools in the current crop of social sofware are optimized for personal publishing and supporting spontaneous group formation. On that fondation, however, new social software features and tools can be easily developed for enabling coherent action to produce results that the team, the community or the organization needs and wants.

In fact, social software and the non-traditional modes of organizing that it enables, will be measured by their capacity to produce results valuable by all their stakeholders, including organizations hosting networks of communities of practice, or federations of free agents competing with large, established consultancies to deliver smarter solutions faster to their customers.

Being useful for the coordination of emergent, large-scale projects in and among communities of practice, innovation communities, or other creative networks, is certainly not a liability of social software but its future strength. Productive self-organization and its enabling infrastructure will have to prove their superiority over the and wasteful tools and methods that they will replace, before this disruptive innovation is to be embraced by mainstream organizations.

Organizational practices which are unable the mobilize the co-creative potential of employees/members, are wasting it. Social software and its users will prove that there's a way to massively reduce that waste.