The Social Organization Chp. 8

Chapter 8 focuses on Electronic Arts, a gaming company otherwise known as EA. EA launched internal collaborative communities in 2008 a crossed its globally distributed workforce, and their goal was to allow mass collaboration without compromising its smaller groups or teams. They ended up launching too many communities too fast, allowing for confusion and in general just too much going on. They launched 15 online communities but soon realized to make a community effective you need 30-50 participants. Most communities did not have enough participants and were looked at as ineffective. The managers of the communities did not take the best approach as they sort of just set them up and watched, did not give incentive for employees to participate and did not participate themselves. The perfect example is for a manager to get the community going, and give incentive for their peers to join and participate, and then let their peers run it from there, but they have to get the communities going first. All in all, EA was able to solve the issue allowing for these communities to promote global collaboration, and allow their widespread employees to work together across the globe. Even though EA solved their issue, it shows how a global community set up the wrong way can be a disaster.