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How do you get a group of people to come together and work using a digital social tool like a wiki or a weblog?

According to Clay Shirky, whom I like for his very accessible approach to these potentially difficult matters (he says he wrote his latest book with his mom in mind “to explain why this is a big deal”), there are three key elements to answering that question:

A plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain

You start with the plausible promise, telling people, that if they come together, they can actually do something successfully. The promise shouldn’t be too ambitious, as Shirky remarks:

If you look at the original document proposing either Wikipedia or Linux, the most striking thing is how incredibly modest the original requests were. But that was enough. It was enough to get people involved.

The tool part is relatively simple, since most digital tools are available in an open source version, and they are relatively easy to set up (or, if your needs are more specialized, it is still a smaller task to define what your needs are). The difficult bit is to pick the right one for the task at hand. Shirky notes:

If you want people to converge on some sort of shared work product, don’t launch a mailing list. If you want people to diverge and generate lots and lots of competing ideas, don’t launch a wiki. Fitting the tool to the job is in many ways a matter of looking out and seeing who else has got a problem similar to yours and what tools are they using.

Finally, the acceptable bargain, which really is the most difficult part. Because the bargain focuses on what the users can expect from one another, and not just the person who took the initiative to get the group started. It is the actual payoff of the initial promise. It requires nothing less than building a positive culture around the tool and the work the users are performing with it. Again Shirky:

Getting the culture right is really an art, and not a science… which is to say that your early culture is going to be set by the people who happen to come around, and you’ve got to work with that while, at the same time, keeping your eye on wanting to have a culture that can scale up over the long haul.

Recognizing these three elements as important is easy enough. Finding the sweet spot between for your given project is hard. Since it depends on your knowing the people involved and finding the proper tool for their shared task to such a degree that they will enjoy working together.