Sociocorpus

Datamail has declared an
“Email Free Day” in an attempt to reduce information overload.

To me, that is like declaring a “Traffic Free Day” to reduce congestion on the roads. That would certainly eliminate gridlock but at what cost? Don’t people actually use cars to get to places where they can relate with each other to achieve something useful? Aren’t car-pooling and public transport better solutions to this problem?

Information overload is not inherent in email itself but in the way it has been implemented as an individual communication medium. It is great for one-to-one, great for one-to-many but very poor for many-to-many communication. As it is usually implemented, email overloads people with content and isolates from each other and the ideas they use in their work.

What is required is for email to be implemented as a group (many to many) communication medium.

Some eDemocracy links from Tom Smith’s blog:

Designing for Civil Society - David Wilcox on technology, engagement, governance.

Reengagea blog written by Jonathan Briggs and Seb Dance about UK politics, citizenship and participation.

Glen asks: how to get users to add useful subject headings.

For starters, the “naming” of conversation topics/subject lines that you want depends on the medium. It always matters but there is no one right way.

In multi-level (tree-style) threading like most web boards, you might want a new title for each post. In linear threading, you want the same one, as long as it’s the same topic being discussed. My view is that linear threading works best in email groups and we have supported that in the “conversations” view in GroupServer.

Whichever type of threading you want, you can only encourage it and tolerate people not doing it. It seems best to me for the software to encourage but not require effective participation. As an example, we are just implementing posting from the web interface of GroupServer email groups. We aren’t calling it “post” tho. We are providing two options, one called “contribute to this conversation” (in which the subject line stays intact) and one called “start a new conversation” (where the participant is encouraged to make sure their subject isn’t already being discussed and if not, think of a good subject line). Well I say “is” but we’re designing those bits right now ;-).

The other way is to have the Participation Coach model and encourage effective participation and to accept the rest. It is only reasonable to ask people to do what makes sense to them and that sense making, especially when it is shared (ie culture), takes time to develop.

Ideally, the Participation Coach, and others who have taken up that role in the group, quickly create new conversations for ones that have “drifted” or “forked” or have just been poorly named in the first place.

Freecycle is a network of networks of people giving stuff away to each other online. They have a good model for replicable locally run online communities… and they use Yahoo! Groups and teach people to use subject line conventions. Very similar approach to ours at GroupSense.

Way up in the remote valleys of Westland are a sprinkling of old alpine huts. Frequented by hunters and hardy trampers, these huts have been deemed too hard to maintain by the Department of Conservation.

Outdoor enthusiast Andrew Buglass has formed a band of like souls to maintain these huts. To promote the cause and record information about the state of the huts, Andrew decided to establish a website.

GroupSense Collaboration consultant Simon Gurnsey helped Andrew to create the Remote Huts Westland site. It took Simon about 25 hours.

Simon also helped Andrew to start Permolat, an Online Group for people participating in the maintenance of the remote huts. Permolat is on the Online Groups site. Permolat is venetian blind material, recognised by back country folks in small strips nailed to tree trunks to mark little-trodden tracks.

Simon lives with his partner Sara on a patch of regenerating bush in the Lyttelton Harbour basin. Over the last three Sundays, Andrew has clocked up 25 hours up the back of Sara and Simon’s place, on his own, slashing at the noxious weed, old man’s beard.

Thank you for the mention in Shared Spaces, Michael - and for the link to your white paper on Collaboration Software Clients. It accurately describes the frustrations that I experience daily as I juggle the multiple clients I use for collaboration.

I await your proposed architecture for a super-client with interest. How can such a thing achieve sufficient interoperability with server-side collaboration technologies?

Is it not more likely that persistent collaboration contexts will be constructed organically out of ad hoc connections made using heterogenous clients? The skills and administration overheads of selecting and running multiple clients are high but so is the flexibility.

Suw of Headshift says:

“the answer is not to cut down on feeds but to find a way of organising all this data more efficiently. At the moment, feed readers are like a library with no indexing, no Dewey Decimal System, and no labels on the shelves. You may like every single book in the library, but if you’re looking for information about a specific topic the lack of organisation is really going to slow you down”

Do we want all of our feeds aggregated into a single one with a variety of filters that can be applied to it?

There are two barriers to be crossed before Online Collaboration can gain momentum: an “Access Hump” and a “Participation Hump”.

The Access Hump has to be crossed by each individual by learning to use a new technology, remembering the location, user name and password and rules of a new place. Some people refer to this as achieving ’social presence’. Hand-holding works well here.

Once the Access hump is crossed, the group has to cross the Participation Hump. This occurs as people begin to contribute and others respond. The benefits emerge from the participation and the participation occurs when people expect benefits. Structured group spaces work well here.

There is a third stage in which the participation pattern becomes complex. The back-channel and links to other groups and individuals form a self-organising and wide-ranging system. Blogs work well here.

A guiding principle for developing collaborative culture:

“I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the
consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater
pleasures.” (Michel de Montaigne with thanks to NewsScan)

Liz Rykert of Meta Strategies has pointed to these “Tools and Experiences” on online consultation collected by the Public Works and Government Services Canada Innovatec program.

Meta Strategies are strategists and consultants in the technical and social aspects of online media with a focus on community development.

With Maureen James, Liz wrote “FROM WORKPLACE TO WORKSPACE - Using Email Lists to Work Together”. I read this in 1998. It’s a useful resource and has a free online version.