Frontiers of Real Time Collaboration
When I think of my community, where I belong professionally, I find my peeps highly concentrated in two places: The Emerging Communications Conferences and last week’s Supernova Conference, #sn09. Collaboration and realtime communication was the topic during a panel discussion on day three. Dr. Weinberger brought the conversation through qualitative changes due to speed, brevity, and engagement; and collaboration norms within vertical subcultures. Side note: Skype wasn’t mentioned once. Here’s the video, my play-by-play notes, and my observations. Part 1. (1 hour) Part 2. (6 minutes) Moderator: David Weinberger (Berkman) Anna-Christina Douglas (Product Marketing Manager for Google Wave) Laura Fitton (Pistachio Consulting and founder of 140.com, co-author of Twitter For Dummies) Paul Lippe (Legal OnRamp) Deborah Schultz (Innovation Design Practice, Altimeter Group) Jason Shellen (CEO of Thing Labs, founding product manager of Google Reader, Blogger.com) Notes: [paraphrased unless quoted] David: What’s different about today’s tools? Laura: Speed of interaction. Deb: Ubiquity. Filtering leads to activation of groups of people, like people who are in the same place. Jason: Engagement and iteration. David: What is good about the 140 character limit? Laura: Meets the need of two-way, social grooming. Jason: It’s short, like a one line joke. Deb: Constraints breed invention. Deb: SAP tried 5000 character tweets in an in-house pilot and it didn’t go far. David: Lowers the transaction costs compared to blogging. Deb: Twitter is more like communication. Sanford Dickert: Twitter solved the privacy and noise problems. "Hmmm – I actually like the 140 character limit – it makes people more efficient with their thoughts – just like how limited memory and HD space made programmers in the 60s and 70s very efficient programmers." My Observations: Collaboration is a lot more than editing a document or a thread together. It’s casting (bringing the right people together). It’s the metawork of common language development, modeling the deliverables in a way everyone understands, goal setting, planning, coordinating, controls, communication. It’s the social activity of bonding around common purpose (sometimes around a paycheck but often around a shared interest or value). It’s trying small things before big things to climb a learning curve of how to work with each other, building trust, knowing who can do what well, of learning who leads, who works, who has insight, who has connections. It’s creating a common vision of the work to be done and how to do it. It’s learning how to resolve differences within the group and resolve stressors from outside the group. It’s creating rituals and rites of passage, of establishing behavioral norms. It’s about finding best practices that help you become productive, efficient, and effective together. Tools like Skype, twitter, blogs, and wikis let people talk with each other but few tools help with any of the other parts (let alone the actual work). You’re still on your own. – Phil Wolff Laura: Public waves weren’t planned but became popular, and are now part of the central design. Deb: The fact that we’re not collaborating more with all these tools out there is what’s really interesting. Jason: One barrier to tool interop is the profit motive. David: These tools give us new kinds of publics. Paul’s software creates gated communities with defined publics. Paul: A great deal of work is uncovering extant knowledge and creating new knowledge. Lots of knowledge is in verticals. Legal OnRamp’s software respects structures for attorney-client privilege, so there’s a public ramp and company-specific things. Solving collaboration as a horizontal problem is much more difficult than solving collaboration vertically. Laura: The fact that twitter is so messy and random and torrential creates an interesting collaborative context. Problems find their way to the right people. Paul: The social structure of law departments and their ecosystem are much more defined. Jason: Knowledge management (document management) systems died, replaced by internal blogs and wikis and search. David: KM systems became records management. When companies bring social media inside the firewall, how do the media change? Jason: Talking in a human voice doesn’t change. It’s still about engagement and virality. Deb: The writing depends on an org’s people, culture, products. Contrast legal vs. media companies, for example. Media tools are making roles more porous. Inside the firewall, businesses have goals, focused energy. David: Is there an anti-hierarchical cultural statement made by wave? Laura: Waves are very democratic today. Enterprises may adapt wave to add back controls. After… Adrian Chan (via Google Wave): "Sorry to have missed it — it just bugs me to no end that in the midst of the conversational turn in web and web tools, so many of us miss the fundamental differences introduced by talk… talk is the mode of production, talk is the means of distribution. that’s social media. it’s not "information" — though it contains information of course — it’s more and much of what more it is still escapes us — escapes our ability to capture, measure, relate, quantify, filter, sort, and so on… tags: skype, #sn09, supernova2009, collaboration, conferenceCall me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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