Becoming a Swarm Catalyst

This article analyzes the problems of bringing in social media in a traditional, hierarchical organization. Difficulties rise from the contradiction between the bureaucratic approach of an organization and the collaborative community approach connected to social media. A change in the role of a developer is analyzed through a case study. The data was collected in a co-development process of a work unit at a Finnish University of Applied Sciences. The method of this study is analytic autoethnography, which proved to be a valuable tool for capturing a long-term development process and the changing role of the developer inside the organization. A new change agent, a swarm catalyst, is introduced at the end of the article. The initial characteristics of a swarm catalyst are based on the experiences of various, iterative developmental experiments. A swarm catalyst operates within an organization as an autonomous developer, and as a negotiator between the traditional organization and decentralized developmental swarms.