Traditionally, in many product companies, a few senior people  at the “top” did most of the “creative” thinking/planning and the majority of the workers actually just follow their directions to build the products or deliver the services decided by the creative types.

This style of centrally managed Cathedral model management where each successive layer of management informes the next level down is rapidly falling apart. More and more companies are moving towards a flatter organization. Towards a Bazaar model. This is true since more and more people are doing the cognitive work rather than manual work. Smarter workforces needs empowerment and hence need fewer managers and fewer levels between themselves and the “boss”. They demand the cognition be distributed and people on the ground make decision close to the context.

To some extent, the open source model has paved the way for this style of org. structure in the software world. Also various collaboration and social interaction tools have emerged over the last decade which really help to scale a flat organization.

It will be interesting to watch how giant companies will structure themselves to compete with the Start-ups.

Over the last few months we have seen a huge increase in members announcing events as discussion on the Agile Alliance LinkedIn group. I think this is a good thing, but Diana and I, as the moderators of this group, have some concerns.

• There is too much noise about event announcements.
• We don’t see why they need to be discussions. There is nothing to discuss about an event announcement. We feel it would be better to add it under News. (I wish LinkedIn would create a new tab called Events. Then folks can publish their events there. For now please use the News.)
• There are some community run, non-profit events, which we know are really helpful for the community. And we want to promote them. So as moderators, we will make them as featured discussion/news.
• There are lots of company run webinars/seminars. Sometimes, we are not sure if they are real events that help the community or are more of marketing gimmicks. We hope our members are smart enough to weed the noise out. So for now we’ll not really do much about it. Except that we’ll request members to avoid using this forum for such marketing events. Also if you notice such posts, please comment on it. This would create bad reputation for the companies and hopefully members will stop misusing this forum.

I’m a strong believer in Distributed Cognition and the Broken-Window-Syndrome. If I see a lot of marketing posting in a forum, I would be encouraged to add more marketing posts or I’ll leave this forum coz there is too much noise. But if we maintain our discussions clean, spammers will be strongly discouraged to add noise.

Also as members of this community we can help. We can comments and discourage spammers. As moderators, Diana and I, delete any such posts whenever we find them. If the post is quite offensive, in the past, I’ve even banned members.

Some more thoughts on, as user group moderators how to keep the spammers out.

I hope this will help us keep this forum clean.

If you have other ideas or want to comment about this approach, please leave your valuable comments below.