Mass Collaboration: CMU Style

Successfully using social media to enable mass collaboration is a very difficult for concept for many businesses or organizations. Many do not understand the idea of working towards being a successful unit. Most organizations are simply finding a way to inject themselves in places where people are spending a lot of their time, such as Facebook, and for some, Twitter.

For example, I will look at Central Michigan University. As a student, employee, and leader on campus, I feel as though I am very well-connected to the pace of the university from multiple different perspectives. Until just recently, it was pretty obvious that mass collaboration was not the goal of CMU. Since the launch of the new website, they have links to their social media accounts, Facebook and Twitter being the most active of the two. 

Participation has become much more evident in that they now ask followers of the university questions. However, I think it would get more attention if they utilized this for giveaways or other special occasions. However, CMU does not have a collective for people who are not engaged in academics. The nice thing for students, is that they are automatically enrolled in the Blackboard collaborative tool that has small collaborative by class, or course type in some cases. However, the utilization of this collaborative is at the mercy of the professor.

There is a fair amount of independence within the system. However, I believe that for university-hosted collaborative efforts such as the websites, blackboard, and email, stability improvements are vital. The university community has lost faith in this process on multiple fronts. As a senior, I have seen four different websites and three different email services in five years. That makes it hard for people to collaborate when they have to keep familiarizing themselves with the tools. It could come to the point where they no longer have a vested interest.