Role-based collaboration. Why is that important?

Open collaboration vs. structured collaboration is one of the main debates in collaborative writing and editing. So, let’s dig a bit deeper into the topic of business collaboration.

Let’s start by stating the obvious: people need leaders. We can’t all be leaders; that would result in anarchy. That’s not a good thing to have in your projects, especially with collaborative business projects. You want to encourage the flow of ideas, so you need to get people involved. But at the same time you have to stay in control of your own business collaboration project. This is where role-based collaboration comes in. You get comments, your collaborators can start discussions among each other, but no one can mess with your collaboration document. Unless you give them permission to, that is.

Let’s take another business collaboration scenario for example. You need feedback on something you’re doing, so you use wikis to share it with some business collaboration companions. Only now you’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. They all have pretty much unlimited access to your work. And they can modify it however they see fit.

Now don’t get me wrong. Open collaboration has its own, many, benefits. Wikis are pretty much the ideal democracy, where everyone has the same rights to the content. But in most businesses (where people have different specialties) you might want to get the SME’s opinion on something, but you might not want to let him edit the text himself. As an author, you should have full collaboration management powers, thus the option to permit or restrict editing.

So basically what role-based collaboration does is it gives you the option of asking for feedback without putting your work at risk. This is pretty significant if you ask me, optimizing your collaborative business experience.

In this article we offered our arguments for using role-based business collaboration.  It would be interesting to know your opinion as well regarding the business collaboration type you prefer/use. Is it an open collaboration or a structured (role-based) collaboration? What was the reasoning behind your selection and, after using it, what argument would you use to recommend that business collaboration solution further?