Participation is the biggest challenge to the success of Enterprise 2.0 in an organization — as it is for any knowledge-sharing exercise in an enterprise. If you can’t get the people with the knowledge to participate in whatever mechanisms you build for sharing it, then it’s patently apparent that you’ll fail in that objective. Frustratingly, the history of enterprise IT is littered with failed attempts to share information and knowledge, from CRM shelfware in the sales office to disused intranets on the company’s central servers.

But if the Web is the inspiration for Enterprise 2.0, then perhaps we should redefine the objective. The blogosphere constantly hums with excitement that “everyone” is setting up blogs, uploading videos and recording podcasts. It’s the year of ‘You‘. But take a look at who is the You in YouTube, for example, and you’ll find that 90% are passive participants. Only 10% upload content, and most of that is just copied from elsewhere. Less than 1% contribute truly original video. It’s the same split between creators, synthesizers and consumers that Bradley Horowitz previously observed among Yahoo! Groups users.

I’m not aware whether anyone has researched the output of that 1% to determine what percentage is useful and what percentage — to be brutally frank — is cr*p. The nature of the Web is that anyone can post anything, and then the magic of the wisdom of crowds allows the best to float to the top, discarding what’s of no value. The proportion of useful material must lie somewhere on a continuum between Pareto’s 80:20 rule and the Horowitz/Arthur 1% rule, and I think you and I both realize that it’s almost certainly at the lower end of the scale.

So here’s what Web 2.0 tells us about likely participation in any Enterprise 2.0 project:

• only one in ten people will contribute at all,
• only one in ten of those will contribute anything original, and
• less than one in ten of those contributions will have any value to anyone else.

No wonder Simon Revell, speaking at this week’s London wikiwed about introducing a wiki to a large pharmaceutical company (Flickr pic courtesy of David Terrar), was so dismissive of the notion of training users how to get started:

“If they can’t be bothered to spend five minutes to work it out, it’s not worth wasting the time and money on training them.”

In other words, concentrate your efforts on the minority who are already motivated to participate. There is no workaround for the 1% rule. Instead, recognize it exists and work with it. With luck, you’ll find it’s more like a 3% or 5% rule among knowledge workers, since middle-class professionals (and their offspring) are more predisposed to posting content online than other demographic groups. But still accept that most of what they contribute will be irrelevant, inaccurate, superseded or redundant, and build the system in a way that allows users to discover and recognize the most useful items.

The real problem of course is that the notion of building a system with such inherent unpredictability and redundancy is anathema to the corporate mindset. No well-governed organization is going to invest in a system for knowledge capture and sharing that has a 99 percent failure rate built in. I know that if you are reading this blog, you probably already understand the nature of the Web and you realize that this tolerance of failure is a necessary part of how it works. But you just try explaining that to the CFO.