IM, wikis and blogs for your business communication
Ross Mayfield posts beautifully on net-enabled bootstrapping, and he should know. Specifically, how Socialtext has used the web to get around the most common cause of crashing for start-ups… the cost of ‘real’ real-estate.
Ross uses:
* Socialtext — the building and garden
* IRC — the hallway
* FreeConference.com — the conference room
* Skype — the meeting rooms
* IM — talking over the cubical
* VNC — peeping over the cubical
* Our blogs — the front porch [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
So how does this compare to your working environment, do you think you could replace the real with the virtual or make do with a virtual environment from the start?
I’m not sure, and also pretty unsure as to whether this would work with any but the most tech-savvy (i.e. the people working at Socialtext) but what is particularly potent is the use of these technologies in a traditional setting for better communication, KM, management and more.
For example:
Instant Messaging - Set up as many chat environments as you want… no-one will ever go there… but introduce Instant Messaging and you’ve got people working from different offices, round the corner or at home knowing whether you’re there or not to ask a question of, share a thought or run an idea past them. Forget about all the ‘IM lowers your IQ’ rubbish and read some qualified research that evaluates (favourably IMO) many aspects of IM:
The Character, Functions, and Styles of Instant Messaging in the Workplace
Interaction and Outeraction: Instant Messaging in Action
Introducing Instant Messaging and Chat in the Workplace
Instant Messaging and Interruption: Influence of Task Type on Performance
Wikis - Socialtext has been particularly successful (as has Confluence and ProjectForum) as while there is a vast range of open source wikis out there, very few meet the demands of a full fledged work environment.
However, there are some open source applications that are still well worth a punt, including MediaWiki, TikiWiki, Twiki & Wakka Wiki… but perhaps the most important thing to understand about implementing a wiki in a real / virtual environment is that it will NOT help you with communication.
Wikis are great for creating, archiving, revising and retrieving material. That’s why wikipedia works so well… granted there may be some serious discussion over particular issues but these are as fleeting and unsatisfactory as your average discussion board conversation. Have you ever subscribed to a wikis RSS feed.. then you’ll know what I mean.
Use your wiki to track projects, store materials and collaborate on set tasks… don’t push them into the realm that blogs fill…
Blogs & RSS - If there’s one point that I disagree with Ross on, however, is that blogs can be an organisations ‘front porch’… granted you might not be about to post CiC messages, but the minutia of your project, you’re latest fix, idea or insight and commentary / responses to your co-workers postings are about the most powerful tools that you can use to facilitate effective communication in your organisation.
You can run them behind firewalls but there are plenty of other ways of providing private blog spaces for your business and, if you do want to run public with select postings / blogs then that’s only going to greatly increase the visibility of your company and its ability to communicate with customers.
Read Centred Communication: Weblogs and Aggregation in the Organisation for a much more in depth examination of how and why bogs can assist communication in your organisation… and move beyond being simply a front porch!
- Posted on: May 14th, 2005
- 5 Comments
- Category: Archives
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Well, I dont completely agree that Wikis are not for Communication. With discussion pages and blog-style added comments you can do an offline discussion for actually finding the oppinion of a group.
For example you can create a policy document in a Wiki, people can add comments or questions to the sections, reformat them until everybody is fine with it.
Wikis therefore support discourse. And unlike Usenet, the result of a finished thread is already digested and archived in a comprehensive way.
Greetings
Bernd
Hi Bernd,
Thanks for the comment… granted you do have the capacity for discussion in a comment / discussion board style format on a lot of wikis (I guess the most well used would be the wikipedia db attached to each page)… however, that’s not technically a wiki and almost invariably has all the problems discussion forums also have (I’ve outlined this in detail here: http://incsub.org/blog/?p=3)
I guess that what I’m saying is that reformatting isn’t actually effective communication per se… the idea of drafting and redrafting (a bit like the ‘books’ tool Drupal uses) might, IMO, work much better for a distributed team.
No if you’re all regularly in touch and meeting then a wiki is perfect, perhaps?
Well, it is not about the comment style, the original Wiki style was full of question/answer threads (using indention and signatures) and ever so often the thread was reformatted into text, or the annotations are kept.
We use this in the Intranet for Stuff which is not a high prio but everybody should be able to comment on it (for example the new coding guidelines).
Discussion Boards and Usenet are just too hard to read after the discussion has ended. In a Wiki you have for example a quetion for an acronym-meaning, somebody else fixes the text to include the description and removes the question, so the future reader is no longer bothered with the (off topic) question. Unlike a thread where you have to filter the sub-threads and aggregate the outcomes.
But you may be right if you call it “collaboration” instead of “communication”.
BTW: on Wards Wiki you find Rules against ChatMode in favour of ThreadMode:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChatMode
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThreadMode
This is a very old Wiki Tradition, Wikipedia has moved that to the Discussion pages to keep the Encyclopedy free of that, howeer it is still an important part of the Wiki culture.
Greetings
Bernd
A significant difference for me between the realities we’re describing would be that you’re talking very much about the origins of wikis, their creators uses and the culture (as you quite rightly put it) that has been built around the technology.
However, the uses I’m envisaging are in a more general sense.
For example, if you have a group of people who’s fundamental work is online then wikis are great because you just bookmark & check… however, if you have a group (say teachers or sales reps) who are always moving about then you need something that hooks into them better… and I’m very much of the belief in this sense that you can’t go better than RSS (although granted, you need to use email for the moment as well).
Even for effective collaboration… because that project / documentation / product isn’t their main focus.
I think the ways in which wikis integrate with email / RSS could be, on the whole, a heck of a lot better… which is why, in a broader context, something like blogs (which do it perfectly) float my boat
Thanks for the links btw, the ‘wiki wars’ between the culture and the people trying to ram WYSIWYGs into them is a fascinating subject.
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