I can easily admit I’ve no clear idea as well about how to frame the discussion. Most people in Italy say that our hierarchical ‘culture’ is not the best for Enterprise 2.0 adoption or that people are not willing to share to protect their position or that most people are not engaged enough for being happy to put their brain at the disposal of the company they work for.

There’s surely some truth into this and social software should probably care much about the peculiarities between different countries but to me another point is clear.

To me we should care a bit less about the tools. Social software could create or avoid to create usage barriers and these barriers could depend on the historical and economical background of a nation but to me what we should be thinking about is how to impact culture, people motivation, engagement, readiness, openness and not how to change the software. Connecting social software to clear business benefits and embedding it into the flow of everyday work (as opposed to above-the-flow) while proving the quick wins people can get from it is the real goal. The fact that most companies in Italy have an evident top-down management structure doesn’t mean you cannot show that other ways are viable and helpful, working both on the culture and the management approach. Putting this work (and so people needs and behaviors) at the center of every project, to me is more important than changing tools that are every day more usable, flexible, freeform anyway.

The question I’m asking is: is it “good enough”, given all that, to just ignore cultural differences (whatever their true granularity or source)? Or is there a way to design software that explicitly acknowledges and exploits them? Where “design software” is meant to be understood as an activity in the “here and now”, as you put it?

What if, similar to the way you can switch languages in most software, you could switch cultural factors as well? Would that be useful? Is such a thing even possible?

I don’t think the problem was / is even worth considering for things like word processors, or spreadsheets — more trouble than it’s worth. But is that also true for social software? Software meant to enable collaboration? I’m not so sure we can continue to ignore this issue for that class of software…

the experience I made is: the less I know about a group, the more stupid I feel saying “they” and connecting it to some clichees. the bigger the distance and the smaller the knowledge, the more we are likely to use big terms (like nationality), and the higher the chances of misunderstandings and misunderstanding
that’s why I try to avoid that and to stick to what is here now
that’s quite a reduction in scope an vision, but I feel it’s actually more productive…

I also acknowledge that I’ve done a bit of strawman slaughter here — the question that I pose in the headline of this post is a rhetorical one.

As I mentioned above, clearly, social software IS “working” outside of the English-speaking locations that invented it. So from that perspective, the answer is obviously “yes”. Thus, the question that I’m really asking (and which I guess I still haven’t made plain enough) is: is it working well enough? What is the optimum? Is that the same as the defaults provided to us by English speaking developers / designers? Are there things we could / should do differently in cultures that speak other languages?

In other words, while I agree with you that nation states are a poor vehicle for talking about cultural differences, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist! And to the degree they do exist, I think it’s interesting to wonder what their impact is on styles and methods of collaborating. To the extent that *those* differ, software that is intended to enable collaboration might work *better* if it reflected them.

The key word in that last sentence is “might”. It might. I frankly don’t know. That’s why I wrote this post.

maybe this is an austrian/central european/balcanic perspective – but don’t you also think that are different criteria for assuming common perspectives than the same nationality?

what nationality, after all. think of romania – turkish, german, hungarian, roman influences with a communist history. or take ukraine: ukrainians hardly think of ukranian without adding something – some feel polish, others czech, russian, some austrian.

the point I want to make is that there are far more criteria for cultural diversity than nationality. nationality does have some influence, but especially in fast changing environments like we have them here in Central and Eastern Europe, the nationality is just a small part; in our daily work, we have to be prepared for many more different thoughts and understandings.

So I doubt that a difference like anglo saxon vs german will help; maybe it does work for this specific case, but it won’t be reproduceable in other markets.

I started some research on this including field studies and conferences; I’m very curious where this will lead to…

My answer to the question ist definitely Zes, it can work – because thanks to the diversity I see, social software will always find it’s users, that’s what it has been design for…

what you say does make sense … unfortunately … and yes it is the least bad of all of the available alternatives …

“The poet Fernando Pessoa created the literary concept of the heteronym. A heteronym possesses distinct temperaments, philosophies, appearances and writing styles– Pessoa had more than 70. Would the words I write here be the same ones I’d exchange with you over coffee at a little cafe on the other side of town? I really couldn’t say…” http://blog.echovar.com/?p=616

What I mean is this: if CSC chose to mandate an English-only policy (based, no doubt, on reasoning about sharing and redundancy not unlike what you speak of here), then I am certain that the result would be that the non-English speakers would simply cease to participate. I’m sympathetic to that — writing in a second language is hard, and that establishes a barrier to participation that most people will not choose to climb over.

Thus, if it’s a choice between people participating, and collaborating with *someone*, but in a redundant, inefficient way, and those same people not participating at all, I would choose the former.

Does that make sense?