The battle to keep alive the second nomination of Enterprise 2.0 for inclusion in Wikipedia rages on over on the Articles for Deletion page where embattled WP regulars have circled the wagons against outside intruders with new ideas.  Oh, well.  Democracy is messy.  Since the opinions of frequent contributors are more heavily weighted than those of us drive-by “sock puppets,” (their words, not mine) I am not optimistic.  I just posted some thoughts there in support of Andrew Mcafee’s position that the argument should not be about the label Enterprise 2.0 but about the new developments that are involved.  Here’s what I wrote: 

For better or worse, Enterprise 2.0 has become the buzzword, or neologism, if you insist, to describe the convergence or collision of a new breed of widely available and deployed participative social networking technologies (those things we call Web 2.0) with traditional hierarchical organizational dynamics. No one yet knows exactly what this will produce in the long run or even if it’s a good or bad thing. It is, however, an incredibly BIG thing and one with enormous implications in the world of business which is one of key building blocks of civilizaton.

Of course, you won’t find a lot of published references in dead tree media about Enterprise 2.0 yet.  It still takes a year or so to get a book published and scholarly articles take months to be vetted and published. (I would point out that the words “Web 2.0″ “Ajax” and “podcasting” did not even appear in the 2005 Gartner Hype Cycle report, published only a little over a year ago. Obviously, they are all over the 2006 report.)

Enterprise 2.0 is not an isolated concept that came out of nowhere. There is a long and rich intellectual trail of work done on participation and collaboration within large organizations before the advent of these new technologies and these are part of the evolving Enterprise 2.0 story.  For example, consider all the groundwork done on “communities of practice,” which is also shorthand for research across many disciplines and has its own full and rich Wikipedia entry.

I refer you to such seminal works in CoP area as:

Wenger E, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wenger, E, McDermott, R & Snyder, W.M.,
Cultivating Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage, HBS press 2002. Saint-Onge, H & Wallace, D,
Leveraging Communities of Practice, Butterworth Heinemann, 2003.

In the field of social networking, which is also part of the E2 story, see this example which available online:

Hanneman, Robert A. and Mark Riddle. 2005. Introduction to social network methods. Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside published in digital form at http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/

Enterprise 2.0, as shorthand for the collision of participative technologies with hierarchical organizational dynamics, also encompasses scientific notions like complexity and emgergence. See, for example, Paul B. Hartzog of the IGERT Fellow Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan who writes:

Technologies that allow us to work together in new ways make possible an era of “do it yourself” cooperation. That means people being able to help each other without relying on hierarchies do things for them. These anarchical networks are best understood within the framework of complex adaptive systems.
So, this means we have to study new phenomena like open source, wiki, and social software, but it also means that we have to look back to the roots of civilization: tribes, gift economies, communities, and political theory.

Enterprise 2.0 is an important concept that is going to go away simply because it does or does not meet the Wikipedia gatekeepers’ criteria for inclusion at this time. It represents the most important and potentially disruptive business challenge since the advent of modern management.