Managing Mass Collaboration
Ahmad Ghazawneh
A. The choice of In-House Development The choice of self development was known, but the Kommune could not go for it, the reason behind that was very clear; the Kommune does not have any IT/IS developers or programmers. The Kommune could not either hire developers for such task, and they prefer to go to the private vendor choice. Mrs. Vildbrad commented: “We are a small Kommune, and we can’t do everything by ourselves, so we have to ask for help from outside” (Interview 3.C.14). Mr. Nissen commented: “I am the only person in the Kommune who is familiar with the Web 2.0, internet applications and users needs. However, I am not a developer or programmer, originally I am a librarian but I have my own web and internet skills, though I was chosen as a web and user needs coordinator for the Idémarken project” (Interview 1.C.5).
B. The choice of Private Vendor The Kommune choice was to outsource the web application to private vendor. This decision was taken unanimously. The Kommune chose a Copenhagen based company called “Social Square” as their main provider and implementer for the Web 2.0 services of their mass collaboration project. There were several reasons behind choosing this company: 1. Social Square considered as a leading Danish company specialized in implementing social software and applications and provides organizations with the appropriate training and skills. Social Square identified their mission by: “We want to help organizations to understand and implement social software - for instance weblogs and wikis. But social software is not mainly about software - it is mainly about being social.” (Social Square, 2008) They also described the nature of their services by: “We help organizations humanizing their approach to markets and marketing - and having dialogues with their customers. And while we help working out the strategy and implementing the software solutions, they transform into more caring, listening and conversational organizations. And in exchange for their community support they get new ideas, better feedback, more agile development - and a very strong sense of their own market and their own innovative power.” (Social Square, 2008) 2. Social Square has an experience with mass collaboration projects and especially for non-profit organizations and Kommunes (municipalities), they developed similar project for both Skanderborg Kommune (idéoffensiv project) and for Midt organization (Anna Amalia project). 3. Social Square offered Hedensted Kommune a package of services, such as supporting, maintaining, training and upgrading. 4. The development cost of Social Square fit with the Kommune’s budget.
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