Project Workgroups

The next use case for the Collaborative Tools Project is Project Workgroups. The sort of online space where people can document their work (in a wiki), can tell each other what they’re working on (in a blog), share files and generally take the pulse of their team.

So far, I’ve avoided the all-out-files-based approach (like Sharepoint or Alfresco) because as I said earlier, I have a deep-seated and purely emotional fear of files (it’s their fault we’re in this mess dammit!)  in general and so we’ve been exploring what wikis and the like can provide.

I have been amazed at how poor many tools are at providing blogging features. It’s almost as if wikis really don’t want to be associated with their more popular cousin at all. Blogs have to be personal and authors need to feel a sense of ownership of them or else somehow they’re not really a blog. It’s just the way it is. And yet most “shared” blogging tools treat the blogs like documentation… uniform… impersonal…

A interesting and probably predictable part of trialling the wikis was the default permissions model… or who can see and edit what. In Elgg, the default state of say a blog post or a wiki page is that everyone logged in to the site can see it. This really scared the horses. Yes it is easy to change a wiki page’s permissions to “visible to the group only” but it was obvious to everyone around the table, or in this case, screen, that someone would forget and hell, or at least embarrassment would be let loose.

The flip-side of this “a bit too free and easy” situation is that when trailing SocialText, an enterprise wiki tool, I added people to their respective workspaces, Biology, Marketing, Maths, Librarians etc.. and people went away, worked hard, created content but because the default permissions model was that content was visible to members of this group, it meant that as a rule, the site felt uninhabited and lifeless.

By meeting peoples’ insecurities about content being private, or “good enough” and hiding content from other teams, everyone suffers… There can be no “happy accidents” or chance encounters when everyones’ office door is shut tight and sound-proofed.

At at this point it’s worth considering what is collaboration anyway? For many, the collaboration isn’t actually working together on say a bid document (in real or close to real time) it is just keeping an eye on other departments and teams and spotting overlaps and opportunities.

This “encouraging people to be open by default” is going to be a difficult nut to crack… not that people are naturally secretive but they often want to practice a bit before they jump on stage. One solution, that occurred quite by accident, is to start with an environment that is completely open…. with the promise that areas can be made more private later… This means that everyone gets to see the benefit (to them) of being able to nosey around other peoples’ areas and that can be more valuable (to them) than the need to be private and polished.