How Much Community Management Is Too Much?

For the first #CollabTalk TweetJam of the new year, I thought we’d cover a topic that has come up a number of times in the almost-decade of these community-driven discussions. How much oversight and management is needed for successful enterprise collaboration? When Microsoft acquired Yammer a few years back, there was a lot of discussion around Yammer relatively flat permissions structure to SharePoint’s much more hierarchical and nuanced management model. The idea with Yammer was for the community to “manage” the community. However, the push for stronger governance guide rails in many organizations has locked down some enterprise collaboration, which more-often-than-not can lead to a decrease in end user collaboration and engagement. So what is the happy middle ground? How much community management is necessary for the enterprise, and how much is too much?

That will be the topic for the next #CollabTalk TweetJam on Thursday, January 28th at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern when we will gather as a community to discuss “The Need for Community Management and Governance.”  Anyone can participate in this community discussion as we share feedback, ideas, insights, and impacts relating to enterprise collaboration within the Microsoft stack (Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, and other workloads).

You can join the community discussion using Twitter and the #CollabTalk hashtag or your favorite Twitter platform. You do not need to be an “expert” to participate in the online conversation, and can ask questions, comment on the questions posed, or just “lurk” in the background. These online discussions are open to anyone — you do not have to be on the panel to participate.

This month’s tweetjam is being sponsored by tyGraph and AvePoint. Thanks for your support!

If you have never participated in one of these tweetjams, it’s pretty simple: anyone can jump in and share their thoughts, or just lurk in the wings and absorb the wisdom of the crowd. Either way, it’ll be a TON of content to consume in a single hour. You can follow the live session using the Twitter UI of your choice (Twitter.com, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, whatever). How it works is that I’ll post a series of questions every few minutes, and people will respond to Q1, Q2, Q3 and so forth with A1, A2, A3, always including the #CollabTalk hashtag with their answers. Feel free to reply as often (or as little) as you’d like, ask your own follow up questions, share relevant links, re-tweet others, and engage with the audience.

The questions we will discuss during the session include:

1. How important is it to actively manage community activities within Enterprise Collaboration?
2. Where do you draw the line between “locked down” and “completely open” in managing Enterprise Collaboration?
3. What *should* community management and governance look like within Enterprise Collaboration?
4. What are your operational governance “best practices” for Microsoft 365?
5. How do you enforce corporate policies and content lifecycles without discouraging collaboration within the enterprise?
6. What tips can you share about making Enterprise Collaboration more inclusive and increase overall engagement?
7. What feedback would you give to the Microsoft product teams to improve community management and governance?

As always, there will be side-questions, side-conversations, and wise-cracking throughout. This is open to the public, so please join in the discussion! The dialog is always thought-provoking and fun.

Participating on this panel (so far):

• Dan Holme (@danholme), principal product manager lead at Microsoft
• Anna Chu (@_achu), @MSTCommunity lead at Microsoft
• Martina Grom (@magrom), co-founder of atwork.at, Office 365 MVP and Microsoft Regional Director
• Adam Ball (@AdamCBall), co-founder of COUCUG, Teams and Skype for Business MVP
• John White (@diverdown1964), dual SharePoint and Data Platform MVP, cto at UnlimitedViz and tyGraph
• Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux), Microsoft Regional Director, SharePoint MVP, and Chief Brand Officer at AvePoint
• Steve Nguyen (@espnguyen), principal program manager at Microsoft
• Eli Robillard (@erobillard), SharePoint MVP, musician, fly-fisher, collaboration technology guy
• Sharon Weaver (@sharoneweaver), Microsoft Regional Director, consultant, trainer and ceo of Smarter Consulting
• Hal Hostetler (@TVWizard), Microsoft MVP and senior field engineer and social media coordinator for Roland, Schorr & Tower
• Eric Overfield (@ericoverfield), Microsoft Regional Director, SharePoint MVP, and founder of PixelMill
• Matt Varney (@thevarnish), intranet manager at KCTCS
• Ed Senez (@edsenez), president at UnlimitedViz and TyGraph
• Paul Swider (@pswider), cto at RealActivity, and enterprise SharePoint strategist
• Norm Young (@stormin_30), Office Apps & Services MVP, director of collaborative analytics at UnlimitedViz
• David Patrick (@DavidEPatrick),  Office Servers & Services MVP, user group organizer, subject matter expert with DSA, Inc.
• Mike Maadarani (@mikemaadarani), Office Apps & Services MVP, cloud solution architect at MCM Consulting
• Kevin McDonnell (@kevmcdonk), senior technical architect at Ballard Chalmers
• Wes Preston (@idubbs), SharePoint MVP, evangelist,  and owner at TrecStone
• Tobiasz Koprowski (@KoprowskiT), Data Platform MVP, founder and consultant at Shadowland Consulting
• April Dunnam (@aprildunnam), Microsoft MVP,  consultant, developer and trainer at ThriveFast
• Eric Riz (@rizinsights), SharePoint MVP and ceo of Empty Cubicle
• Kurt Kragh Sørensen (@KurtKragh),  intranet consultant and owner of IntraTeam.com
• Craig Jahnke (@techJahnke), co-founder Chicago Power Platform User Group, co-chair M365 Chicago, customer engineer at Microsoft
• Galen Keene (@sdkeene), consultant and collaboration architect, managing partner at Butterfly Technologies
• Darrell Webster (@DarrellaaS), Office Apps & Services MVP and co-founder REgarding365.com
• Shari Oswald (@shortcutshari), co-founder and productivity evangelist at PowerUP! Learning
• David Drever (@DavidMDrever), SharePoint MVP and SharePoint services lead at Solvera Solutions
• Jay Leask (@jayleask), principal solution engineer for AvePoint Public Sector
• Harjit Dhaliwal (@Hoorge), Microsoft MVP, IT Pro, technology & social media evangelist
• Kanwal Khipple (@kkhipple), Office Apps & Services MVP and founder of 2toLead
• Noah Sparks (@noahsparks), community igniter and strategy manager
• Raphael Koellner (@ra_koellner), Office Servers & Services MVP, consultant at Bechtle IT-Systemhouse Cologne
• Toni Pohl (@atwork), founder & cto of atwork, cloud consultant, Microsoft MVP
• Sherman Woo (@SPsherm), business solutions consultant at Uptempo Consulting, co-founder SPS Vancouver
• Beau Cameron (@beau_cameron), Microsoft MVP and senior engineer at Aerie Consulting
• and your host, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), Microsoft MVP & RD, founder & ceo of CollabTalk LLC

If you would like to be included on one of these panels, please drop me a line via email, LinkedIn, or Twitter. And thank you again to tyGraph for your support of these CollabTalk tweetjams! And finally, if you are interested in being a sponsor of a future tweetjam, please contact me.