Data is an ICT communication agency. Data started out developing tailor-made applications based on inspiration from artificial intelligence computing. Within ten years Data grew from a small core of 12 developers to more than 130 employees. As the company grew, the projects it performed got bigger and its services slightly more product oriented. With a continuously growing portfolio of projects, and continuously growing size of these projects, Data needed to enhance project management skills in the organization. These skills included formal project management procedures, such as budgeting and contract negotiation, as well as softer skills, such as management of client expectations, team motivation, and so on. A wide range of project management skills proved hard to nail down. These skills were typically tacit practices lacking clear-cut definitions, involving emotions and people skills, and drawing on collages composed from a wide range of experiences. Communicating these skills, the experiences of the employees and managers, across the time and space barriers that project work placed on them, became a central issue.

One of the tools developed for this cause was Scheherazade's Divan. According to the ancient Persian tale, Scheherazade is the story-teller in the 1001 Arabian Nights. Each night for 1001 days she tells the King of Persia a story, and his waiting for the next story is what keeps her alive. Like Scheherazade, Data figured that it needed stories to stay alive, or at least to keep on growing, thus it created Scheherazade's Divan. Scheherazade's Divan is a virtual story mediator, designed as computer software that presents stories. It presents a large sample, all of them created by employees and managers in Data. These stories are comprised of different formats, such as text, cartoons, movie cuts, sound files, and so on. All employees in Data can contribute stories, and there are no predefined notions of style or content. In other words, Scheherazade's Divan is an attempt to articulate and capture some of the informal practices in the organization, nourish them, and spread them throughout the organization. One day a programmer chose to video-tape himself telling a story from a project he had just entered. The project was fairly large, the customer had recently criticized the mid-project deliveries, and there had been internal friction concerning the staffing of the project. In the video the programmer criticizes the project, identifies project members, describes the con- tribution of some of them quite harshly, and portrays himself as a knight in shining armour, saving the project. As he does this, he sits, laid back, by his computer, with an ironically twisted grin on his face. Less than two hours after the videotape was presented on Scheherazade's Divan, the management team removed it. Within minutes the whole organization knew not only that the story had been withdrawn but also that it was there in the first place. The whole organization was in a buzz; some resented the idea of censorship, some thought that the story as it was told should not have been presented in that way, and others again thought that it was correct that the story as they thought it occurred should be told.

Questions 

1. The creation of Scheherazade's Divan can be explained as an authorizing of employees' knowledge and voices. Discuss the pros and cons of enabling, and authorizing, informal communication in a public space.

2. Censorship of communication is found in any workplace. Discuss the different formal and informal forms that it might take. 

3. Communication such as Scheherazade's Divan was intended only for internal dissemination: is it realistic to think that what is designed for inside stays inside?