Blogging UX Week - Facilitating Collaboration - Freitas
Facilitating Collaboration
You’re running (or even working on) a project, and you want everyone to be on the same page. How do you get there? Ryan Freitas from Adaptive Path, known around his office as the productivity / collaboration guru, gives his thoughts on new technologies - and new methods - for facilitating group production. (From his talk, this is definitely a well earned moniker.)
Everyone’s heard of 37signals’s Basecamp. It lets a group keep track of tasks and milestones, features a document repository, and definitely fosters collaboration while allowing for coordination (two important ‘C’s of a winning project).
What is colloboration? To Ryan, it’s fostering ideas, intentions, and interests. Collaboration is not just working on a project together; it’s moving beyond team to close-knit interdependent group. In Ryan’s idea of a team, there’s no possible communication failure: technology enables each group member to make the others aware of their every thought.
What do we actually use to accomplish those goals, to create transcendent teams? Email, IM, and the phone. Email, IM, and the phone do not help teams succeed on their own.
Look at del.icio.us. It lets you show your group what you’re reading; what your reading influences what you’re thinking. If your team knows what you’re thinking about, they’ll be better able to anticipate your ideas before you have them.
Collaborative tools all help teams in different ways along the various types of collaboration, found in this chart below:
| Attenuation | Status | Communication |
| implicit | —> | explicit |
Ryan believes great collaboration tools help form a "governance architecture" which begs the question: "how do you put your systems together in a sensible pattern?"
Part I: We need to fix "out of office," slow decision making, and email overload, which lead teams to lose track of our documents and thoughts and wonder "Where’d we put that?".
This lack of alignment leads to redundancy as team members work separately in silos. Take MS Exchange, which is billed as "email-based collaboration." When we use a platform like Exchange (or Lotus), "We’ve tried to use highly structured platforms to capture highly unstructured activity."
Part II: Moving past the Swiss Army knife approach to colloboration tools, which are nothing more than bad top-down solutions. When we forgo using any tools, "we tend to should": if the tools we’re using don’t support our activities, it’s a lot easier to just shout questions to each other across the office. Do we shout ourselves hoarse (and who keeps track of the shouted reply?) or do we begin to experiment with lightweight, ad-hoc tools?
Part III: What we’re using now: tools that facilitate distributed and autonomous collaboration. How do we evaluate collaboration tools; what criteria do you use?
- Appropriateness - does it get the job done
- Commonality - "is it something we can all access" how quickly can we all get to the same place?
- Centralization - are we forced to use this through a dashboard? (Like in Lotus Notes and Exchange, the dashboard often hurts collaboration: the software is a feature-bloated, jack-of-all-trades, master of none).
- Portability - can I get things out of it? Can I get things into it?
- Uptake - you have to be able to consider that we must share it with others. What will it take to get everyone on the same page?
The styles of collaboration tools are (or, in another sense, just what the heck they do):
- status
- realtime editing
- attenuation
- visualization
(Here, in my notes, I jotted down a great project-process quote: "It’s not toast yet, it’s still bread." That’s a great way to say something needs a bit more polish.)
Status - Twitter (or twttr) is a social texting service: send a message to twttr and it txts your group or team; its function as a group-send SMS tool lets you "nudge" groupmates.
How do you get people to adopt status tools? Encourage narcissism: encourage people to share their photos, txt ideas back and forth, and generally - and geniunely - feel like their sharing their lives, not just their work, with their team. Built a team by building friends.
Realtime editing - Because email wasn’t built for version control.
- Writely - realtime word processing
- Google Spreadsheets - lets you see changes as they happen. No need to wait on version 2 to be emailed; start working together on version 3.
- SubEtha Edit - a Mac-only collaborative text-editing tool that lets users send invitions to live-edit documents.
- 37signals’s Writeboard
How do you get people to adopt collaboration (real-time editing) tools? Context is everything. Use the right tool for the right job.
Attenuation - Paying attention to what other people are doing. Blogs— "I had no idea you were thinking about that." Blogs help us leave visible trails that our groupmates can persue to see what’s in our heads at the moment. Blog entries are there for everyone to read, and they are persistent. Blog content is easily repurposed.
How do you get people to adopt blogs? Establish guidelines, not ruels. Encourage everyone to "Put that on the blog." Why? Because "I want to know what inspired you to write." magnolia and bloglines really help us build these visual thought trails.
Visualization - Seeing what one another is doing.
- Instant setup is crucial
- Screen sharing is more important than seeing someone’s face
What’s wrong with Webex or Placeware: they cost a lot, suffer from high latency, and, most importantly, don’t work.
VNC, Vyew, and thumbstacks let us build and collaborate visually (and, in the case of the latter two, online).
If you’re thinking of adopting these visual tools, only experiment with them in a safe environment. If you’re pitching something to a client and need that screensharing program to work, you’d better test it beforehand.
Wikis - "The 800lb. Gorilla of Collaboration." The wiki can work as an intranet: it breaks the content bottleneck that companies suffer from when each department must name that one guy who gets stuck with typing up all the ideas and making every update.
On adopting wikis: make sure to work on fostering grassroots behavior. Wikis work best when you’re not required to use them, but encouraged to use them as a place to stick your ideas or processes or innovations, or to improve the ideas, processes, and innovations of others.
What happens next? "Re-centralization": MS and Lotus are trying to crank out new versions of tools that don’t work. Look at the innovation from Jotspot: they’re building a calendar and wiki, running out two successful products to combat that monolithic email/productivity/office app. "Chandler" is being developed by the open source community as a "Personal Information Manager" (PIM): essentially, it promises to be a free alternative to keeping track of all of your info (appointments, etc.) for sharing with your workgroup.
