However at some point, things drastically changed, and the unknown elite white wizards of tech that were driving the disruptive innovation got totally absorbed by this new platform, called mobile. It showcased cool smartphones and exciting tablets bidding for community-baked software, that lured them away from really important stuff, such as rss and open web platforms, and allowed for the green wizards of tech (evil leprechauns working for money and power) to create walled gardens in the publishing area for the masses such as the establishment of institutions like Facebook and Google+, the latter being a devoted follower and acolyte of the former (I still haven't figured out if I can email a set of photos from my google+ account as regular attachments with a simple text to a god-damn email address from my gmail address book! That's an obvious feature that's missing! Bastards!). But I digress... The point of this post isn't as much to discuss technology per se, but rather to share with you guys my experience at getting traction and involving fellow co-workers into these new collaborative tools and platforms. Because you see, the problem to me isn't much the tools, but rather the inertia in people's mind to fully adopt these new tools. And I mean to adopt tools such as wikis, web-based docs editors, web-based calendars, etc...
Mostly my experience tells me that if you don't have a strong leadership at the top, then people will give you a real hard-time to get into the new tools, say, in a medium sized company. Guerrilla wikis really have a hard time at getting adoption and traction from the bottom-up and climb through the hiearchy.
Back in 2006 I installed mediawiki for the group where I was working. Ever since then, the wiki proved to be a success, but of the 30 or so people that worked at my group, only 5 or 6 created about 90% of its content. And never, ever, people seemed motivated to focus on the wiki as a serious technical documentation publishing platform. It never got adopted officially from the top (a forum, created a few years earlier was heavily praised and adopted by top brass) and it survived only because, in many aspects, it became the best available public repository of documentation. Many times I had to battle to keep it going, to salvage it from extinction due to IT-related incidents, etc... it was hard, it was worth it, but it certainly wasn't because of the cheers of fellow co-workers. I did had the backup of the IT team and they certainly approved it. That was cool.
Another experience I had was with Google docs. In 2006 I tried to share a google doc for collaborative proof-reading and editing with a senior officer where I worked. I had a really angry reply from him. I had to sent him a word doc as an attachment via email but he kept some grudge on me, thinking that I was being too dispersive on these new technologies. Maybe he had a point, but I guess that I was too passionate about the potential these new tools could deliver that I couldn't understand the basics of human behavior. The bottom line is: using standard conformal technology actually increases effective collaboration. The standard technology however will change from context to context. Working with middle-aged lawyers in Portugal means that standard technology consists in printing out every email and having assistants digitize manuscripted replies (the amount of work produced is directly proportional to the amount of amassed paperwork that can meet the eye). Working in a regular office means using e-mail, MS-Office documents and printing stuff from time to time.
Ok, the most fun experience I had with collaborative content publishing was when I proposed a simple wiki site (jottit) to organize our new year's eve trip. About a dozen people, some of them I never met before, making about 80% of the partyers adhered. I had the chance that two big influencers in the group got attracted in the idea from the start. This created an "avalanche" of adherence. If it weren't for these two top influencers backing me up, it probably would have remained ignored. It was great, it worked really well. Here's the link: https://pedrogao.jottit.com/. The positive aspect is that it even allows to publish photos and videos as memories of that great trip. Best experience ever. However, a large percentage of the people going there were my former Physics course colleagues, many of whom are nowadays reputed scholars with PhDs (well, or at least about to be in the future, they're still all barely thirty years old). It was easier to work with them with collaborative web-tools.
And finally, the more meaningful success in collaborative working I had was with the week-end football matches I organize. Because most of these guys don't care about technology, they're not interested and they just want an efficient, quick, easy and secure way to organize a list of players. And the thing is that the players must sum up to the exact 14 integer number. At first, we would all use email and do email lists. It was the common denominator tool for all of us. However, email had some problems when players would cancel their enrollment by replying to another thread. The number of emails exchanged between more than thirty recipients was massive, with threads with over 100 entries. Email was our common denominator but it was too cumbersome for this fourteen-entries list. So then, after a weekend soccer game that went bad due to a mis-communication between one player that couldn't come, I proposed a wiki (jottit again) to create and manage the list. I was the top-brass at organizing these football games and I had earned enough credits and respects from all the players. Also, the editing was surprisingly simple enough - a single shared password, no logins, a super simple wiki syntax, great ergonomics, no-hassles website -. It was actually easier to use than to find the last thread in the email archives, and more reliable too. Also, we had a historical record to see who registered its name first, by the second (first in, first served at the fourteen spots list) and no clutter. At first, some were skeptical if it would work, but now nobody ever suggests to go back to the mail thread rat-race again. In the end, a problem with a former technology, a strong leadership and a new technology that solves the problem with a simple and intuitive interface were the key ingredients to make thirty or more tech-agnostic sport-jockeys adere to it.
Thus, these stories remind me (and you) that collaborative tools are peanuts to the amount of work, energy and leadership that it takes to convince people to work together in a *new* fashion.
That said, how have these tools evolved since 2006? It's been more than 6 years since my crush on Collaboration 2.0 grew! Well, I guess we can look at the Arab spring movements and we can see that the Retweet and the Facebook Event are perhaps the most meaningful tools of power for the people and for democracy. I personally lived a 300 000 citizens peaceful manifestation in Lisbon the 12/3/2011 that originated from a public event posted with a simple manifesto from anonymous citizens (they signed with their names but nobody reminds who they were, they were from the 99% and that was all it mattered), and from a song of the portuguese popular pop band "Deolinda" -- a song with a very similar reach to Bob Dylan's sixties song "Times they're a'changin'" --. These popular revolts 2.0 and Wikileaks are the most treasured things that have happened to the web since the web 2.0 term was coined in 2001 and are direct consequence of it.
But how about the working together as a team in a company for a niche business? What about the google docs, zoho and skype toolset? How has it evolved? Well, I do get to see a trend in file sharing tools for instance. I used to use drop.io, but they disappeared when Facebook bought them. Then I started using ge.tt which is my new favorite tool to share big files with my pupils. I also use dropbox because some colleagues use it too and it simplifies sharing. It is convenient for me because I can push and sync my documents between my several devices (ipad, android, work windows PC, personal debian laptop). Since I work at an university in a research unit in water quality modeling and operational oceanography, managing hundreds of scientific references is a relevant but menial task, so the group is nicely adering to Mendeley and Citulike; I've been using citeulike to manage my references since 2007. Both tools work nicely to share references with colleagues. However, the google forms, docs and calendars somehow never really caught up with my group. We're still stuck with MS Office like in the old days. I guess nothing really came as a reliable enough alternative. Since we develop code (we have this water quality modeling tool called MOHID), we use subversion and codeplex to share the code between developpers and advanced users. I'm still waiting for some web-based code development IDE to come, eheheh :) Sometimes, we use skype to held conference meetings. Google hangout works too, but I only used it with my wife, so far. Screensharing and recording for later screencasting are nice tools that I'd love to use. To do screencasts I use Jing for windows, but I don't consider it "collaborative" working. I also use youtube to broadcast promotional videos about a product or a service. But this isn't collaborative work as well.
Thus comes LucidMeeting, their team got in contact with me (yeah they found out I was passionate about collaborative tools, which was true back in 2006) and asked me if I would like to give their product a try. I said ok, but only for a little while. I did read their mission and I did look at their vision and I can attest that these guys have the passion for the problem they're trying to solve, this gives me confidence (and I'm a heavy user of web-based apps, check out my google profile...). The problem tha matters that they are solving is that there isn't a good enough tool that allows separated team members, distributed around the Earth, to enable them to meet face to face AND to keep record of what is decided AND to work together on documents, all at the same time. Lucid Meeting argues that Skype + Google docs isn't good enough because along the way one looses what was decided in the skype meeting. They argue that an integrated collaborative experiment from extreme-to-extreme provided by a single coherent suite of tools is the answer, and that is what they're trying to propose. This is the Apple way of thinking actually (I just finished reading the portuguese translation of the Steve Jobs bio). An integrated environment works best when you want to get tech out of the way by providing a smooth and coherent user-experience and let collaboration alone start happening. They could have a point and if I ever get to start a team with team members physically distant, I will certainly into LucidMeetings and see how things work.
Anyway here's two lists of tools that I use and their user-cases: one for Productivity 2.0, which is a mature concept in my opinion, which works and which won't disappear.
- Ge.tt - to share or publish large files
- Blogger, Posterous, Evernote, Cinchcast, Youtube - to publish texts, images, notes, audio or videos
- Delicious - bookmarks of sites and logins.
- Dropbox, Mendeley, Citeulike - To sync pdfs and bibliographical references between devices.
- Google docs - To archive documents that I don't need to sync with other devices with dropbox. To publish spreadsheets such as students grades and the like. But I don't use it much really. I tend to rely more on MS-Office for most docs I create.
- No decent latex web-based editor, ide.
- No decent web-based code IDE yet available.
- Google code - for hosting personal software projects.
- Google+, Facebook and Twitter - Useful to procrastinate :p
Here's another list for Collaboration 2.0 tools that I successfully used:
- Mediawiki - created the MOHID wiki. It rocks! But contributors are a limited percentage of its readers.
- Jottit - best hassle-free, free, simple, get-things-done wiki ever. Used it for party-by-partyers-for-partyers management. Used it to create a roster list for weekly soccer matches.
- Skype - video conference. I don't like it much, it works.
- Google calendars - I share one with my wife and the sms reminders she receives of events I schedule do work and she appreciates.
- Codeplex, Google code - for hosting and publishing open-source software projects.
- All in all google docs don't really work much for me and collaborators. The only person with whom I get to collaborate with with google docs is my wife.
Actually, Collaboration 2.0 has a much harder time to replace old forms of collaboration and it certainly doesn't capacitates collaboration where there was none prior.
The truth is that for a real collaboration disruption to happen it will take a big change in the mentalities and in the local organizational cultures. New tech really isn't the answer.
We can hope however that companies, organizations, institutions and whole nations, for them «to remain competitive, they will be forced to adapt and follow leading organizations with massive collaboration, such as Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the old Phone phreaking networks, the Internet. But this change will occur over a couple of generations probably. In this context, the speed of tech inovation beats demographical renewal time, thus making the latter the limiting factor to Progress.
Wow, that was a big post. Thank you for reading it through. Leave a comment if you like.
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