Collaboration Support and Context: future directions shown by Google Wave and Colayer

It has become apparent from experiences in recent years that successful knowledge management strategies need to address the issue of successfully connecting people to people.  To accomplish effective knowledge work, workers have to increasingly collaborate and this collaboration may increasingly span different organisational entities, time and space in a flatter world.  Collaboration systems have been developed for years and the explosion of Web 2.0 solutions and services has provided many additional approaches for connecting people though blogs, wikis, social networking sites etc.  Yet when I look at my current interactions, projects and collaborations what do I see: many people still often prefer to send that email with an attachment, and I am not unguilty myself in this email culture.  As a project coordinator I can then be left with the job of having the additional task of getting the message or document on that wiki that we are using to support the collaboration, but which many seem to find difficult to incorporate into their way of working.  One could take a draconian approach with project rules, but that often may not be feasible or successful. 

Also as we sign up for more social networking sites, collaboration spaces, wikis etc., we have an accompanying increase of emails with links, alerts, updates, news summaries etc.  So our email noise and traffic has been increasing.  This has led me to a survival strategy of restricting my social network signups or ignoring many such Web 2.0 generated emails.  But one still has to keep an eye on the important messages one should not miss.  The end result is often one of increased administration rather than that of enhanced people-to-people connections, co-working, better knowledge management and effective collaboration.

So I found it interesting recently to see that an extensive conversation had started on Colayer which has been supporting our eCheminfo and InnovationWell community activity about the new Google Wave announcement at their recent developer conference.  So I went to see it myself on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ  As both an indicator of what we could be using soon for collaboration, an exciting Open Source initiative and perhaps the most high impact development in the IT industry this year, it is really worth taking a look. Plus they organised a very good demo - they kept my interest and attention for 80 minutes!  A lot of the concepts are what attracted me to Colayer when we were initiating our community activity end of 2003.  Perhaps the time has finally come that we will have a new wave of innovative collaboration support solutions accompanied by user adoption and we could possibly overcome the poor existing email work practices and email overload.

Maintaining the context of our conversations is what is a key principle here, and the Google Wave demonstration shows the integration of many activities which are often fragmented across a variety of tools and locations into the one context.  So I can email, message, edit documents, add images, conduct searches, carry out surveys, track issues all in this one context and can export in real time the integrated knowledge products to other contexts, e.g.  as I am typing  a message or adding an image it can be simultaneously updated on an external third party blog, and other collaborators can even join me in real time for that work.

Since moving to Switzerland in 2001 I have had numerous conversations over the years with Colayer founder Markus Hegi who has been promoting and developing such concepts with his Colayer approach and his declaration that “email be dead soon”.  However, although I have always been able to communicate with him and his coworkers at Colayer without using email, I have not found email dying with many of my other situations and work contacts and like many have an increasingly severe email overload problem!

There are two Colayer concepts I would like to mention here which I think are particularly powerful  for collaboration support.  One concept is that of what Colayer calls the “Times Page”.  On Colayer all conversations and contexts take place in different communications areas called “comties”, each which can have a different topic context e.g., for a project or interest or discussion topic.  When you visit Colayer you can take a “Times page” view of all new messages and content that have been added since your last visit.  You can also control what you want displayed and prioritized on your Times page.  So it is like obtaining a morning newspaper view of communication activity ordered by context.  This contrasts greatly the unstructured dump of a couple of hundred messages into my inbox, which filters do not seem to have helped very much either.  This is an example view of what such a Times Page view looks like:

Now if we could get a critical mass of people collaborating through such a Colayer and Times Page view or through a Google Wave, would that not be a significant step forward?  Disregarding here all the technical issues on approaches to applications, the concept seems extremely sound from the knowledge management point of view.  We just need significant adoption from users to take off and perhaps that is now finally coming!

A second Colayer concept I would like to mention here is that of the shuttle or idea weaver shuttle.  The shuttle takes you to any location of conversation or content where you can subsequently add your content, conversation or images in a collaborative context.  Again we are freed from the isolation, torture and desolation of our fragmented  email box to interact in a much more collaborative place, to weave our ideas with those of others, and to experiencing that place of knowledge co-creation with our collaborators.   Here is an example of what such a virtual conversation accompanied by shuttle navigation looks like:

Working this way is however new to many people who have become used to spending most of their day immersed in a desktop application or email box. We must unlearn our immersion in these isolated environments and learn to spend more time in our collaboration work spaces.  Sometimes we may also need to disconnect from the noise of the collaboration space, to focus on our individual knowledge work, but that should not be the paradigm for all work, especially as we have increasing collaborative activity. We also need to continue to blend the right balance of our face-to-face and virtual activity.  It is still very hard to beat the conversation of a small group discussing a topic around a table.

In an essay on a “New Renaissance Period in Science” 15 years ago when I was in a relatively colourful and idealistic mindset at Oxford I wrote:

The hype of the information age is transforming itself into the reality for the computer user. It is becoming increasingly common for a researcher to have the ability to convert a structure from a remote database into manipulatable graphical images on a screen. Computer simulation, information technology and electronic publishing technology will converge into an era of interactive communication of a type never before possible. Authors will become publishers, readers will readily be able to swop roles with authors by interactively viewing data from a research paper and starting their own simulated experiment, to ask "what if?" questions about changes in experimental conditions or model parameters, to add their contribution to the growing "live" paper, to forward their own interpretation.

and

The best technology of the future will increasingly involve an understanding of the human condition. Its explanation and presentation may intertwine with the arts for poetic interpretation and communication like never before. We will be pilgrims of knowledge freed from the chains of rigid discipline, we must leave the command science approach behind to pursue more flexible and dynamic structures, to explore avenues that transcend old boundaries. We will solve new problems in new ways and do so with passion and conviction. In a New Renaissance period we will view a rich colorful world through our kaleidoscopes.

and we have had such developments happen but only in part 15 years later.  As an older and less idealistic writer I will rephrase the last quote into a more realistic expectation for coming years:

The best collaboration technology of the future will increasingly involve an understanding of the human condition. Interaction and knowledge exchange between people will intertwine with communications like never before. We will be pilgrims of knowledge freed from the chains of email boxes, we must leave the "send email" approach behind to pursue more flexible and dynamic structures, to explore avenues that transcend these old boundaries. We will solve new problems in new ways and shared contexts and do so with passion and conviction. In a New Renaissance period of the Knowledge Web we will view a rich colourful world through our kaleidoscopes.

Perhaps then my virtual co-working will become more like sharing that conversation with you on the river ferry in Basel and we will be happier co-creating the shared answers to our questions.

Barry aka The Ferryman

Comments

[Amol]

Really i can see whatever is there in Google wave and much more already developed by Colayer,really great thing just people should come to know about Colayer...

[lilly]

Such a wonderful writeup.

[Jörg Kurt Wegner]

Nice Barry, I posted a critical discussion on Google wave on my blog
http://ff.im/3HfHl

[Markus Hegi]

Good write-up of the basic problems today -

And thanks for explaining some http://colayer.com concepts - Yes, if you are working with many independent contributors, it is very difficult to bring them all to one system - and the ‘lowest common denominator’ is often only email – That’s probably the reason, why Colayer was much more successful within company intra- and extranets.

The challenge for us (the tool developers) for groups of independent collaborators is then: To integrate email in a seamless way into the tool - so that three profiles of users can work in one group together:
1) The 'core team' working on a Google Wave or Colayer system.
2) Some contributors may work only with emails - The task of the tool would then be, to guide the emails back in a very smart way to the right place within the context.
3) And some contributors may use both tools: they may send emails to submit information, and they may log-in to get an overview of the progress, collaborate in a document, perform a real time meeting etc -

We have integrated email into Colayer now – do you think it could work in a community of independent researchers?

[Rakesh Biswas]

I liked this line very much:

The best collaboration technology of the future will increasingly involve an understanding of the human condition. Interaction and knowledge exchange between people will intertwine with communications like never before. We will be pilgrims of knowledge freed from the chains of email boxes, we must leave the "send email" approach behind to pursue more flexible and dynamic structures, to explore avenues that transcend these old boundaries.

You should send me a book chapter on how this could be applied to health care.

rakesh

http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=657

[Nida Rafiq]

See Also:
http://blog.internet-briefing.ch/2009/06/22/google-reinvents-email/

http://blog.internet-briefing.ch/2009/06/22/interview-with-markus-hegi-founder-ceo-colayer/

For more links, visit to:
http://colayer.com

[Siddhi Nagaonkar]

Nice blog! For more links, please visit http://colayer.com/PAGE_googlewave

[Akshat]

I have just one question - why is it that I heard / read about Google Wave before Colayer?

Fantastic write-up, Ferryman! The 'Times Page' and the 'Weaver Shuttle' concepts are just fabulous.

But the dilemma stays: If I have to eventually open my mailbox to get 'updates' triggered from a collaborative platform, are we really inching towards what we're set out to achieve? I cannot be hooked on to a single page on the web. An e-mailbox gives me that one-stop shop to get what 'I' want from the web!

Very rightly said though, that this is something that can work very well within org-wide Intranet / Extranet applications. Not sure about its success in the community of independent researchers...