Osama Mansour

Wiki-based community collaboration in organizations

Social media technologies are increasingly used within organizational settings. Particularly, organizations continue to adopt and use wikis for enabling collaboration among their professional communities of practice. At this respect, the current paper reports results from an interpretive case study focusing on the use of a wiki for knowledge collaboration and sharing at a large multinational organization. It examines how the wiki is used by members of several professional communities of practice through interviews, observations, field studies, and documents. It concludes by showing that the openness of the wiki has a dual impact on wiki collaboration and also discusses how the wiki might serve as both an enabler and inhibitor for community and knowledge collaboration.

The Not-So-Open Wikis: Structures of Collaboration At Work

The current chapter discusses issues related to the use of the wiki technology at the workplace for social knowledge collaboration and sharing. This kind of technology is principally flexible and free in the sense of allowing people to create, edit, and shape content collaboratively. However, this chapter argues that the application and use of a wiki within an organizational setting might be influenced by social and structural properties that govern collaboration and sharing. It is based on empirical data obtained through 11 semi-structured interviews with employees working for a large multinational organization. The theory of structuration was used as a theoretical framework to guide the empirical inquiry. Eventually, the chapter concludes with discussing a number of structures associated with evolving norms, interpretations, and resources that govern and shape the use of a wiki as a tool for social and open collaboration.

Social Conceptualizations of Technology Structuring: A Comparative Analysis of Wikis at Two Global Organizations

The widespread adoption and use of social media in almost every aspect of our daily lives may outpace existing empirical understandings. In organizations, social media are increasingly used by professional individuals and communities to support dynamic collaboration and knowledge sharing. While there is a growing amount of research on this subject, still little is known on how people use different kinds of social media in practice. That is, there is a need for an empirical understanding that addresses actual use practices of social media within the formal boundaries of organizations. To this end, we report on results from a qualitative comparative study of the use of wikis at two global organizations. Our aim is to develop an empirical understanding of the enactment of structures and the ways by which people structure and organize their wiki use practices by drawing on Orlikowskis (2000) practice lens. The findings from the authors analysis suggest a number of enacted structures that reflect diverse wiki use practices. The main contribution centers on developing three key mechanisms that provide means for understanding the structuring of the use of technology.

Social media at work: structures of collaboration

The present document provides a general overview of my research which aims at understanding the emergence of new organizational arrangements in the context of using open Wikis for knowledge collaboration and sharing. It also provides an overview of my research, motivation and discussion of the research problem, aim and research questions, and methods. Further, an overview of the current situation of my research is presented. Finally, it provides a discussion of the benefits from participating at the CSCW2012 DC.