It's all about letting go

I’m developing a community platform for a group of 150+ students from all over the world and I was explaining the tag stream which is being displayed in the platform, to one of the facilitators. At a certain moment he asked; “how can I edit the links or descriptions which are being displayed?” .

This question in itself is of course valid, but it reminded me of the tendency to want to control what a group displays on their own platform. Actually the question raises the issue, whose platform is it? Is it the property of the organizers/facilitators to edit, manage, control what is being displayed? Or is it a platform you provide for community members to show what they want to show and share. That in itself is a decision you take, but I believe a truly social platform or community platform is not controlled from above. At most it should be steered or guided.

Which reminds me of an extraordinary example of letting go. Of course I’ve lost the article which discusses this example (reminder to tag ALL articles which make an impression!), but I read that after being elected, Obama changed his position on one of his election promises which led to furious discussion in one of the groups hosted in his own online social network “MyBo”. The group or forum was not closed down, even though highly negative comments were being posted. Rather it was left open and the group received an official notice from the Obama team explaining his decision.

Letting go is one of the most difficult things managers face with the introduction of social media in a work context. At least that was my experience when I introduced a social media based intranet at my former place of emplyment. I am curious to experience how easy letting go is experienced within an educational context.

“Tag stream”: flow of bookmarks being pulled in from an external social bookmarking platform, filtered by the use of a unique tag. See the tag stream to the left from http://delicious.com/tag/smssc.