Facilitating Collaboration: Web Technologies That Work

[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

Starting a recent project:

• Set up a basecamp

But collaboration is not about project management. PM is important but you need to collaborate before the to-dos, milestones, and deliverables.

First things first:

• E-mail address
• super-secret AIM name
• mobile number

But then there's the other things:

• del.icio.us links relating to the project
• blog name
• bloglines OPML
• IM status
• flickr
• twttr

So why these things?

Communication, status, and attentuation; from explicit to implicit. It's easy to ignore e-mail, hard to ignore IM.

Governance architecture is important here. How do you coordinate activities across systems so you can get from A to Z. This is a system for using simple tools. With a little training and management you can go a long way. This is about circumventing big tools that don't let us work the way we work today.

Thing of these things as a toolbox. You move from hammer to table saw, etc. through an agreed upon framework.

Part One: How we got here

What happens out of the office, slow decision making, email overload, and "where'd we put that."

We are trying to avoid lack of alignment. Redundancy, miscommunication. We are siloed and this doesn't work. It's like starting a conversation in the middle without context. We are trying to avoid anything out of left field. Collaboration prevents this.

Note that when we are talking about collaboration for millions of people Lotus Notes is collaboration.

The downfall of Lotus was predicted in 1998 but it isn't happening. They face challenges from Exchange. If you look at Microsoft's brochure they sell "e-mail based collaboration."

Perish the thought...

We have e-mail overload. We've tried to use highly structured platforms to capture highly unstructured activity. We want to push an interest into a project.

We have a swiss army knife that does everything really poorly.

We have a centralizazd platform that doesn't do the job.

Bad top-down solutions give people the excuse to go in one of two directions.

1. They forgo using anything. This is why people shout across the office. This is tool aversion, a natural instinct to complicate things, to not put a tool between you and your information. This is short site, there is no artifact of this communication. There is no way to pass it on.
2. You experiment with other small tools to avoid the big tool. The great thing is that it really works for you.

So what is AP using now?

Tools that facilitate distributed and autonomous collaboration. You don't want to send a feature request to a programmer and wait for a top-down process. That doesn't work.

We have a ton of options so evaluating tools is really important. And this is beyond good or bad, this is about:

• Appropriateness: Does it work for what we are doing
• Commonality: Can we all use it and can we use it anywhere
• Centralization: Is it simple and straightforward
• Portability: Can I get in and out of it
• Uptake: How quickly can we get it common

There are many styles of collaboration tools.

• Status: Are people available and in the tool right now? Is there continuous presence. flickr is a great example of this, it let's you communicate current place and thus status information. This is somethin Dodgeball gets wrong. Status is more than location. This is why IM status messages are really powerful. "poll: what's a portal site?" is a great example of a way to ping everyone and solicit information. Throw what's going on with you out into the world. Another example is twttr. Group SMS mailing lists to single numbers. Nudge is a great feature that let's you request status from your group. It is a great way of getting lightweight status messages. So how do you adopt these status tools? SMS and IM don't need help. Encourage narcissism, you want to know what's going on with everyone. Tell me if you need help of if you are cranking and need to be left along.
• Real-time editing: E-mail wasn't built for version control! Why are people sending six versions of Excel sheets in e-mail? It is clearly not for this purpose. Writely is an amazing example of this. So is Google spreadsheets. You make changes as they happen. But the problem with this is the same as the conference WiFi problem. Response slowness is a big issue here. This is the strength of SubEthaEdit. It doesn't depend on http. Writeboards are different. They are not real time but do offer great versioning and URL sharability. You don't have to worry about sending things around and iterating and it is super easy to get out of it. The goal is to get rid of email as versioning. The thing to focus on is appropriate context.
• Attenuation: We need to get at what people are thinking and whats going on. Blogs are great for this. Use a company blog for contribution and reading. When you are way you can read the blog and know what's going on in people's heads. You will catch up on what new ideas are going around. These are visibile trails, artifacts in the world of thought. They are things that your colleagues think are interesting and worth caring about. Blogs are persistent, they offer a timeline so you can watch ideas develop. Content is also easily repurposed, they can fit into any governance architecture. Copy to a wiki, send the URL around (make em into a whitepaper). Establish guidelines with these but not rules. You don't want to set hard and fast rules, you want to collaborate. "Put it on the blog" becomes a mantra. This also connects to del.icio.us. You can see great primary source info. If you tag appropriately this can be very effective. Ma.gnolia is also a handy tool for this.
• Visualization: Many people use Netmeeting and other conference call tools. This is more than just talking about it, this is about seeing what other people are dong. Instant setup is crucial, no fussing about IP setup. Screen sharing is more important than seeing a face. Pointing with a mouse and talking gets you 90% of the way there. What's wrong with WebEx and Placeware? They are expensive, slow, and often don't work. Go for free tools and common tools. Check out vyew. VNC is a geek solution to this problem. Instead of trying to share a screen, just try to do a presentation. Check out thumbstacks. Tread carefully with these tools. Don't try them out in an important meeting. They will detect that you need them and then promptly stop working.

So what's the 800lb gorilla: wikis.

And we have to talk about wikipedia. It is a great example and resource.

You want to establish an intranet quickly, let employees manage docs, and it needs to be cheap or free. Wikis make great intranets. Email is a bottleneck.

Wikis let you share information so people can help solve their own problems. The democratic nature of wikis make them perfect for sharing information.

When you are adopting wikis you can't have adoption be the goal, make objectives discrete, measureable, and attainable. Measure e-mail usage before and after. Much like "put it on the blog" add "put it on the wiki" to your lexicon.

So what happens next?

Recentralization... Lotus is coming out with a new version. It's slick looking but still doesn't solve the problems that need to be fixed.

Jotspot has incorporated calendaring into wikis. This brings things back to a centralized tool.

Another thing is OSA Foundation's Chandler PIM.

We need to get to a point where we can work together without horrendous top-down tools.