Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Andrew McAfee writes about the concetric circles for knowledge workers - there are close colleagues, people you directly work with, people you could potentially work with, other people in your company and people you have no relation to. Social networks are tools that allow you to widen the second circle. They allow you to get to know more people for possible collaboration you do not know already and they allow you to manage loosely coupled relationships to more people than you could without tool support.

A recent piece by Alex Iskold: The Social Enterprise - What Works, and What Doesn't says social tools in the enterprise allow communication paths outside the organization chart graph. The reason is that classical tools for enterprise organization like the org chart focus on positions, not people. To illustrate this, you could use a sketch like this: We can see clearly the boxes and arrows, indicating the organizational structure. As for the people, the organizational contents, we can only see the head clearly, for all other people in the organization that we do not know directly, vision becomes blurry.

With social networking tools it becomes possible to see the actual people behind the positions, you can find out about interests, activities and create an image of a person you have not yet met in real-life, but which could help you in a future challenge.

This allows you to create connections and social structures that span multiple branches of the organizational tree. As an effect, people become more important than their position in the org chart and you can create more decentralized organizational structures like virtual teams.

As a side-note: While writing this post I realized how this people (social content) over organization (social structure) notion reflect David Nüscheler's mantra of "content first, structure later" applied to social systems.

A browser crash has killed my first attempt to write this entry, perhaps just to make me write a more dramatic first sentence. My prediction is that 2008 will be marked by collaboration convergence, this means

• tightening and deepening the connections between collaborative applications and related fields like social networking, content management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, business intelligence solutions, business process management and so on.
• blurring of borders of individual collaboration tools like digital asset management systems and wikis, wikis and blogs, blogs and forums, forums and mailing lists, mailing lists and chat, chat and instant messaging, instant messaging and twitter, twitter and time tracking, time tracking and task management, task management and workflow management, workflow management and document tracking, document tracking and document sharing, document sharing and digital asset management
• deeper integration of web-based collaboration software and desktop-bound productivity software. Right now, some people equate web-based productivity software that allows a degree of content sharing with collaboration software, but this will change.

Signs of this integration are:

• EditGrid's plugin for Microsoft Excel that allows users to edit spreadsheets on the web in EditGrid that are automatically pushed to the opened Excel window combining power of desktop tools and ubiquity of web-based tools, both to collaborate.
• Google's integration of desktop widgets that come with Google Desktop Search and iGoogle, allowing your personal web-page to embed real-time information of your hardware state.
• Mozilla's WebRunner that allows you to install web-applications like GMail or Google Reader as standalone desktop applications (via Marcel Weiss)
• Blogbridge, the feed reader as an example of desktop software that is truly web-aware.
• Apple's .Mac, back from hibernation combines desktop remote-control, a virtual hard drive, a photo gallery, and a web/IMAP mailer that is tightly integrated with the desktop operating system

Many people have been criticizing Apple's strategy of tight coupling of iLife to .Mac, but this coupling - publishing photos right from the desktop application (iPhoto) to the web and re-aggregating photos back in the desktop application is a good example of the future of convergence.

Yesterday I finished my latest article "Elements of Collaboration" that is a collection of 74 patterns for collaboration of knowledge workers. I've gathered tools, methods, social software and social behavior patterns related to creative collaboration and presented them as an periodic table of elements.

I hope this collection of tools and methods is a help for orientation in the vast area of collaboration and productivity for information workers.

The term "free-form collaboration" is heard quite often these days, but still there it is not made clear what free-form collaboration is and why it is more important today than ever.

Free-form collaboration means that team members are not bound to typical transactional workflow process like managing a customer's request, but instead that they are seen as rational and responsible adults who need freedom to work creatively, to innovate, to design and to invent that can find their own workflow of dealing with tasks, in which order, in which way, with which priority.

Being a creative knowledge worker means that the same path can hardly be gone twice because every creative challenge is a new one. As a result, no strict and fixed workflow processes should be enforced, because they are not able to deal with the exceptions as intelligent humans are (and these exceptions happen all the time).

But free-form collaboration means more: It means freedom to work with the best team members for a job, regardless of department or company affiliations, regardless of city or country of origin. It means freedom in place of collaboration, some knowledge workers prefer to work from home or a café instead of their office. Do not force them into places where they are unproductive.

For more information, see the entry "What is free form collaboration" in my collection of "elements of collaboration".

My slides for my talk Supporting Technical Documentation Processes with Open Source Tools held at Linux Tag 2007 in Berlin are available at SlideShare: Supporting Technical Documentation Processes with Open Source Tools Slides.

Robert Cringely writes about The Final Days of Google. He makes up following equation:

"Gather a bunch of smart people, they will create new ideas, some good, some very good, some better than your original idea and you cannot recognize or pursue all of them, so they will be pusued by other people, who will kill you", then the threat to Google is not gathering smart people, because they can still leverage a fraction of the ideas their employees are generating."

The problem is, with modern distributed collaboration technology it is much easier to gather a buch of people, even smart people, without being a real company. There are more ideas generated outside Google than inside. When people outside Google can collaborate as productive as people inside by forming a virtual organization, they, together with the right idea have the potential to kill the cash cow.

Some days ago I was asked "Why are your spending your time and energy on Mindquarry? The topic of collaboration has been around for over ten years, shouldn't it be solved by now?". I think the topic of computer supported collaboration, or collaborative software is a topic that will be still hot in ten years of now, simply because the focus of collaboration is changing in the same way as the work humans are doing is changing.

And the topic of collaboration has been around for some time. To underline this, I researched the roots of the concepts we are covering and combining in Mindquarry: file sharing with version control, Wiki, task management and group conversations: Some of the roots of the concepts and tools we are using are reaching back more than 35 years. For instance SCCS, the source code control system can be seen as a predecessor of RCS which was a predecessor of CVS which is a predecessor of Subversion which is used in Mindquarry's file sharing.

Taking the Usenet which is seen by many as the predeccessor of Web 2.0 and many styles of group conversations: It dates back to 1979, preceding even SMTP, the technology driving today's E-Mail system. Instant messaging applications, first found in form of UNIX talk program have been reinvented in the 90's as ICQ and with Jabber there is an open source IM protocol that was mainstreamed with Google Talk in 2005.

Even computer-managed todo lists probaly date back to one of the first uses of interactive text editors in the 70's, but it took years to come from an MS Project top-down approach of task management to the distributed approach of Bugzilla and other issue tracking software.

Another example: The idea of the WWW as an read-write medium date back to the initial development of HTTP and HTML in 1990, but it took five years to the first Wiki that practically implemented this vision and another ten years until Wikis became mainstream with Wikipedia breaking the 1 million articles barrier.

To answer the initial question: Collaboration is still a hot topic, because not only the people and the way they work changes, or the way they perceive technology changes, also technology itself takes it time to mature, to become adopted by a mass audience. The collaboration tools of tomorrow will have their roots in todays software.

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Some day ago I read an interestsing blog post by Joshua Porter how Social Networks are Killing Email. In this entry he describes how closed messaging systems in social web applications like MySpace or OpenBC are killing email:

I recently talked with a father of a MySpace user who said that he tried to email his daughter using regular email and she never responded. He asked her why and she said, “I use MySpace for email. Send me mail there”. So he created an account and now he messages her there. Wow.

Indeed, wow. Daughter and father are voluntarily leaving their communication to a closed system that will not let outsiders take part in the communication nor that allows the participants to take the conversation log with them when leaving the system.

In a linked study from the comments the changing communication patters from three generations Net, Nexus and Boomer are described. The Net generation (youngest) uses instant messaging and SMS most often, while it is seldomly understood by the Boomer generation. Again we see that different generations are locked in their conversationspaces because they are unable to cross the border from email to instant messaging or SMS or proprietary social network messaging.

A system that enables collaborative conversationspaces must work hard to break down the walls of existing communication media. A conversation is a conversation and should be accessible by all participants, irrelevant wether their preferred mode of communication is email, NNTP, online forums, MSN, Jabber, AIM or some other instant messaging protocol.

The concept of tagging is not new (in the old times it was called keywords), but with web applications like del.icio.us (which I use regularly), Technorati or flickr, using tags or keywords as lightweight metadata has become popular again. The nice thing about tagging is that it allows you to categorize data according to more than one criteria, opposed to strictly hierarchical organization schemes like folder hierarchies or taxonomies. What is new about tagging in Web 2.0 applications? First, there is the concept of folksonomies which helps uses finding the best tags based on tags assigned to an item by other users. But the most important improvements are new user interfaces that make tagging very easy by adding type-ahead suggestions, browser extensions and bookmarklets and tag clouds that make tagging an web item just a matter of klicking the bookmarklet, klicking some suggested tags and hitting return.

The exciting news is that tagging is slowly moving from the web to the desktop. Desktop innovation happens at slower pace than web innovation, mostly due to the fact that there are much longer release cycles, but some applications like leaftag for the Gnome desktop (screenshots, video), the Quicksilver tagging module for Mac OS X (described by Livehacker as 'Metadata as a filing system') and some interesting fake screenshots of a tagging feature for Mac OS X Leopard, which look very good show the direction of development. All modern filesystems support metadata as file attributes. It is now up to the desktop developers to implement tagging interfaces for this new kind of lightweight metadata.

If we take a look ahead we will see in some years metadata-enabled desktops, metadata-enabled websites and tagging an accepted orgainizational principle. What we should be looking for is a metadat-enabled workspace environment that takes up the opportunities of tagging and lightweight metadata and support sharing of this metadata to be able to organize the data of collaborative workspaces, knowledgespaces, taskspaces and conversationspaces. An example of a tagging-centric organization of conversationspaces is vennt, an online forum software I discussed before.

To-Do lists are a basic tool for productivity. Diomidis Spinellis writes about best practices for Efficient Human Multitasking. He shows at what time and what place what kind of tasks is most appropriate. For example if you are in a work environment that allows only low concentration like an airport, you should start tasks that require short time (to avoid costly interruptions) and low concentration like

Sort email, Spell-check documents, Take care of beaurocratic chores, Annotate photographs, Experiment with new software, Web surfing, Optimize graphical design

In a quiet environment that allows high concentration however, you should to tasks like

Create an outline for a new publication, Debug code, Software design, Devise algorithms, Read complex papers

This would be a great fetaure for a modern task-management system. Instead of simply delivering to-do-lists without any ordering as it is done by most current systems or a simple ordering based on priority and urgency, a context-aware task-management system could show only tasks that are appropiate to the specific situation.

For example if you are working in the office very early or very late and most of the colleagues are out of office, the system should propose high-concentration tasks. In the afternoon the system should propose tasks that require a lot of interaction and communication because most communication-partners will be reachable by that time.

There are even more possibilities when you take mobile devices into consideration. The task list synchronized to your PDA or smartphone or iPod should include only tasks you are able to do on the road and leave high-concentration tasks to better working conditions.

Wikis are an important and popular tool for collaboration in many open source projects. In the article Using Wikis on the Intranet: The British Council Case Study Maish Nichany shows how the Wiki concept can be applied to other knowledge worker teams outside the open source or software development cultures. The most important points are that

• Wikis need the right culture. A culture that fosters communication, talking and negotiating. A wiki is a tool for better communication. If there is not already a culture of communication in an organization, Wikis will not establish it.
• Wikis need concrete Wiki applications, or "A practical, compelling reason to collaborate, to share". Again, a Wiki is a tool for a cause. Without this cause, e.g. a collaborative effort that needs to be optimized, a Wiki is without use.
• A champion who can show the way. Someone will introduce the Wiki and this someone must be the one to encourage and invite her teammembers to collaborate.

As a side-note: Wikis are just one means of improving communication in teams of information workers.

I've attended yesterday's Webmontag in Berlin. It was quite interesting, but the interesting parts were not the ones I expected:

Ting and Gobby

Mattis Manzel talked about Ting. A ting is a collaborative editing session that is supported by three tools: A collaborative editor like Gobby, a Voice-over-IP client like Skype or Teamspeak (Mattis said Teamspeak's push-to-talk-feature makes it the best program for tings because it does not distract from writing and disciplines the users) and an extension of MediaWiki that will save the exported document (The extension seems to be Mutante/MoonEdit and was originally designed for the proprietary MoonEdit).

The main idea is that a bunch of people meets at a specified time at a certain server and launces their collaborative editors. The appointment for time and server will be made using a wiki page. People start writing and discussing what they are writing by embedding comments into the document and using the VoIP tool. After completion of the ting, which might take from 30 minutes to five hours, the created document is copied into the talk page of the wiki.

From my point of view, collaborative editing is an extremely intesting topic and I see many connections to Wiki software, but I am not sure how the Ting concept could be used for more than geek entertainment.

Structured Blogging

The part was the unexpectedly interesting part. Baju Bitter introduced Structured Blogging, which I head about before, but have seen it as just another way to make blogging even more complicated. After hearing Baju's talk, I've changed my opinion. The basic idea of structured blogging is to define data types for blog entries. For example an weblog entry can be a review of a book or a movie, it can be the announcement of an event and many more. The structured blogging initiative provides a definition of blog entry types and relies on the popular microformats concept which embeds machine-readable data into HTML by using CSS class definitions. Furthermore it provides plugins for two weblog tools that make creating structured weblog entries easier by providing editors that are suited at certain blog entry data types.

Most interesting part of this concept is that there are already aggregators that are utilizing these structured blogging contents.

• edgeio finds listings of things you would like to sell in blog entries, think of it as a decentralized ebay (which would need Rapleaf integration, of course)
• incredibooks is a list of book reviews by children and teenagers.

If you are capable of reading german, you should further check out Baju's collection of links, his weblog entry on this Webmontag and the german structured blogging website and forum he maintains.

Readers Edition

Finally Peter Schink of Die Netzzeitung showcased a new Cititzen's Journalism project: Readers Edition which will go live soon. Nothing new, but nice webdesign.

Expert-talk
Originally uploaded by diskostu.

When it comes to designing software that supports discussions like weblog comments, e-mail list archives, online forum software, issue trackers an important question is how discussions should be represented. One option is to show a full discussion thread which can evolve into a massive tree of threads like it is done by digg.com. The other option is to represent discussions as flat conversations like most weblog software or Google's Mail application does. Another fine example of discussions as conversations is Vennt, where I have one beta invite left, so comment if you would like to test it.

Signal versus Noise discusses this topic, too: Dealing with comment threads at blogs. This blog entry cites Joel Spolsky, who argues for conversations, because this helps focusing the discussion on one topic.

I think, the correct solution depends on the mode of discussion. If the number of participants is small, limited and defined like in most real-world conversations or meetings and there is some goal to reach, conversations are the best solution.

But for open discussions with a potential large number of participants like these going on at digg.com or slashdot.org, threaded discussions are best, because they allow to lead sub-conversations and structure the discussion. Imagine a large place in the real world where everyone could shout his opinion - no real discussion would be possible - discussion threads help you finding the one you are answering to.

According to a study in the MONEY Magazine, the best jobs in the USA are:

1. Software engineer
2. College professor
3. Financial advisor
4. Human resources manager
5. Physician assistant
6. Market research analyst
7. Computer/IT analyst
8. Real estate appraiser
9. Pharmacist
10. Psychologist

with technical writing jobs heading: technical writer (13), curriculum developer (18) and editor (19). The study analyzes prospects of market growth and current earnings. Successful software vendors will create software for these types of work that require skill, creativity and teamwork. (via Scott Abel)