Ryan Cohn 1000 Word

Video Courtesy of Youtube

Change can be a funny thing. It Is something that many of us fear, or it takes shape as something that is badly wanted. The only fact about change is that it does not care whether you want or don’t want it, it just happens. My generation is absolutely filled with constant change, now this is something that every single generation say but I think where mine differs is from the online perspective. I have had the opportunity to grow up in the most technologically advanced stage that we as humans have ever reached. Growing up this way means I have adapted to every type of new communication that digital technology has had to offer me. First we had the digital home phone (which is a very old fashioned sentence now), then I got to have my first flip phone (no camera in case you were wondering), then we moved onto more advanced phones as well as computers that came with new ways to communicate with each other. We can see someone’s face through the telephone now and have a real time conversation with them! Moving on from our little history lesson, the main point of this piece is to discuss collaboration and more specifically, online collaboration. What exactly is online collaboration? Well the perfect example of online collaboration would be something like Wikipedia which is the example used in our class reading “What is Collaboration Anyway?”! Having previously done a lot of research on Wikipedia it is all handled and run by users on the internet, at its inception you did not even have to make a Wikipedia account to create or edit a post that was on it. As it has grown and the user base has expanded we have seen a unique set of checks and balances come into place there. It is fully operated by an online community that has elected editors and what not that have more control than someone who just joined the site but through collaboration is how Wikipedia has come to be legit. Nobody can walk in there now and post whatever they want on the page, any information that wants to be posted needs to have at least 2-3 credible sources and is then checked and sent through the appropriate channels and from there someone with the power to say so will then approve the posting and it will then go up for all to see! That right there is what we call online collaboration. This type of collaboration is becoming more popular every single day and people want to know just exactly how to do that. Recently I was researching other examples of successful online collaboration and I came across a story that totally blew my mind and it made me realize how big of an effect online collaboration can have on a company and charity. The story came from the HyperOffice.com and the company specializes helping other business’s set up virtual offices and through their cloud based system of business related products that allow for business to be done wherever and whenever. The company in need of this product? The Schizophrenia Society of Canada or also known as the SSC is a non-profit organization in Canada that reaches out to families and individuals who are effected by the terrible disease. Here is a more in depth description from the article,

            “The SSC, a Canadian non-profit, was founded to provide support and education to those affected by schizophrenia and psychosis, and their families. The SSC, whose functions include wide ranging activities such as providing educational resources, funding research, advocating for legislative change, and providing support and consultation, generates its funds solely from donations. Funding was therefore unpredictable, and in 2006, things were looking bad.” (Forrester)

As you can tell running a non-profit is not an easy thing to do, earlier I mentioned Wikipedia which is also a non-profit company who is extremely successful and you can attribute this to online collaboration. The SSC was not as lucky already have that infrastructure in place for them at this point in time and the quote mentioned above, things were indeed getting bad. In 2006 the SSC had raised about $1 million dollars in funding but by the end of that year they were at a deficit close to $32,000. For a company that is only funded off of donations they were about to have to dip into their reserve funds which were going to be quickly depleted by the continuation of running deficits. To make things worse during these troubled times the non-profit’s executive director at the time decided that it was time for him to resign leaving everybody else to clean up the mess that had been made. At this point not even basics like rent and administrative salaries could be paid for the organization to operate. It was time for the new brain trust at the SSC to get together and come up with a solution on how to save this important service. They decided that it was time to use the Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle method to ensure the sustainability of the funding from donations. They also added a new R to the formula which was realignment. By doing all of this the new strategy forced them to close the main administrative office and move all work to a virtual workplace to greatly reduce the cost of maintaining an office as well as a building. They had the idea in place but needed to find someone to help them actually implement the idea and that is where hyper office came into the mix. They were able to give them an operating system where they could have files located in easy places as well as a new email set up that is very similar to the Outlook program that the SSC had grown accustomed to using. That was all the icing on the cake but the best part of using Hyper Office was that they implemented a new safer and cheaper cloud based operating system that allowed the SSC to ditch the old server based system that was also costing them extra money. They are now fully online based virtual office that allows the organization to collaborate with each other at any time and any place and has saved over $52,000 over the past two years because of the switch. Online collaboration is so important because even though it can be a lot of change, sometimes when in dire circumstances you can either adapt or die.

The Schizophrenia Society of Canada Goes Green and Virtual with HyperOffice Collaboration Suite. (2011). Retrieved October 25, 2017, from http://www.hyperoffice.com/going-green-with-hyperoffice/