eMail Free Days Not the Answer

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.

eDemocracry

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.

Threading

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

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.

Permolat and Remote Huts

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.

Collaboration Software Clients

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.

RSS Readers: Tools for Information-Sharing or Overload?

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?

Online Collaboration has Two Humps to get over

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.

Covet Pains that lead to Greater Gains

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)

KM Organisations in Aotearoa (New Zealand)

I have been a member of NZKM for over a year now. I attended a worthwhile event they held where Larry Prusak presented.

There is also a small informal chapter forming in Christchurch (catalysed by Julian Carver of Seradigm).

I've just signed up on the website of the NZ KM Society, an Auckland-based network of KM practitioners.

Maximum Sponateous Participation

Psychodrama and Sociometry contribute significantly to the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of GroupSense online collaboration services. More than that, though, they provide the vision and inspiration for this work of increasing collaboration in social systems.

JL Moreno’s goal was the maximum spontaneous participation of every individual concerned in the groups in which they live.

This excerpt from Moreno's writing is as applicable to work, learning and knowledge-sharing groups as to any:

“…we have to consider every individual in [their] concreteness and not as a symbol, and every relationship [they may] have…. we cannot gain a full knowledge unless every individual participates spontaneously in uncovering these relationships to the best of [their] ability. The problem is how to elicit from every [person their] maximum spontaneous participation. … how to motivate [people] so that they all will give repeatedly and regularly, not only at one time or another, their maximum spontaneous participation.”

Thanks for this quote to Sara Crane, President of the Canterbury Westaland Branch of the Australain New Zealand Psychodrama Association.

Memory-Based Collaborative Filtering Works Best

This infovis article on Collaborative Filtering provides a good summary of various approaches to ACF and concludes that :

"Memory Based algorithms outperform the others in yield and quality of preference prediction. It turns out, on the other hand, that they are the most conceptually simple and the easiest to implement, too."

Effectively, if you have enough data about people's preferences, you can predict someone's preference for an object they haven't rated from how the object is rated by other people who have similar preference profiles.

People who like what you like (your "taste buddies" in Walter Logeman's words), also like this.

Social Capital

I expect that JL Moreno would have agreed that he was concerned with:

the collective value of all "social networks" [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other ["norms of reciprocity"]

This is the definition of "Social Capital" from the website for Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's 2000 investigation of social capital trends in US society.

It accurately describes the business that GroupSense is in.

Culture Change: A Flywheel that Gets Faster once it reaches Critical Momentum

Imagine a world where flywheels were just as hard to get started as they are in our world but where, once they got started, they get faster by themselves.

This is what culture change is like. If you get it right, once a certain point is reached, it just gets faster by itself.

This gets called critical mass. Unfortunately, that term technically applies to nuclear reactions.

T4T4T Review Due for Release

Yesterday I attended a presentation at CORE of the Review of the recently completed T4T4T project. This was a research-oriented pilot of online community of practice for teaching staff at the four major tertiary institutions in Canterbury.

It is encouraging to see the extent to which online collaboration is being embraced in this sector and the richness of the learning gained through this pilot. I recommend reading the review when it is released.

Some questions emerge for me.

While T4T4T clearly shows that it is possible to increase the opportunity for participation among tertiary teaching staff, it seems that the motivation to do so remains at best variable. The increasing incentives for the NZ tertiary sector to focus on research does little to encourage it. What can be done to develop a culture of development in teaching and learning in this area? One idea raised at yesterday's meeting is encourage research into subject-specific teaching.

The pilot also shows that there is some interest in teaching and learning among tertiary staff. I would be interested to hear of any research as to what these folks are doing already to act on that interest. If we are to invest in encouraging this, would we be better to create new communities or to encourage and teach people to join ones that are already there - or simply to start their own?

CTA Qualifications in Applied e-Teaching and Support

The Canterbury Tertiary Alliance has developed a set of Qualifications in Applied e-Teaching and Support. The core courses are taught online in site supported by Interact from the Christchurch College of Education.

The team involved in the project have already developed a vibrant online community among themselves and the participants in the pilot for one of the courses. Their aim is to continue to develop this community of practice, research and learning around the qualifications.

Tags as Community

I heard that communities are forming around agreements to use particular tags for, say flickr. One was around Gay Pride Week in Minneapolis. It is pride2005?

At the recent meeting of the Online Deliberative Democracy group, we agreed to use the tag ODDC. That works nicely in Gataga.

Gatheroo: new community organizing and meeting site

Chris Dykstra of Warecorp is one of the founders of Gatheroo, a new community meeting and organising site. It's free to the people and groups who use it and is supported by providing highly targeted advertising.

Gatheroo is due to open in the (northern) fall. If you are interested, you can register now.

Gatheroo is built on top of open source collaboration platform CivicSpace.

I recently met Chris in Minneapolis. He is evaluating GroupServer for some significant projects in the US.

Stephen Demming Speaking in NZ

If you didn't know about this, give some thought to registering for the Telling tales at work sessions.

Stephen Demming is a world expert in the use of stories to spread insiration and good ideas.

SMS is eLearning Technology

In a meeting of eLearning specialists the other day, I rashly declared that the most powerful eLearning technology useed by my 12 year old daughter is texting (SMS) on her cellphone.

I said it in an attempt to provoke some controversy but to my suprise, people nodded their agreement. As I reflected on it, I realised that it is true. Despite the terrible interface, Elsie sends over 500 text messages per month and, presumably receives just as many. It's all socialising with her friends but isn't that one of the most important things for her to be learning to do? And, given that access to and literacy with this technology is increasingly ubiquitous, why shouldn't it be used for other learning areas?

My son Ed has recently acquired an iRiver. For now he's using its 5 gigs for expanding his musical awareness but he could easily carry his homework around on it.

Now, a report prepared by education.au for the ACT Department of Education and Training suggests that cell phones and iPods will soon be core accessories for learners. It's called Emerging Technologies: A framework for thinking (900kb PDF).

ASCII Free/Busy Searches

I read somewhere that the single most common use of email is scheduling synchronous meetings (mostly face to face).

How many times have you beein in something like this:

7 Dec 1400: Simon, Susan & Sharon are OK. Sam & Sally to confirm.

How many times has it been much messier than this?

If everyone's got an up-to-date digital schedule on the same server, free/busy searches can work well.

Here's a low tech approach to using email for free/busy searches:

       December

       0                 1                   2                   3

       1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

       t f S S m t w t f S S m t w t f S S m t w t f S S m t w t f 

Janne  + + - - + + + + + ? ? + + + + - - - ? ? - - - - - - - - - + 

Ville  + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + -

Kalle  - - - - + + + + e e e - - - + - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +

Sanna  - - e e - - - + ? ? ? + + + + + - - + + - - - - - - + + + +

                     * *           *

Collaborative Q & A

Yahoo! Answers allows participants to ask and answer questions and to rate the answers, contributing to the reputation of the answerers.

It has categories but why not tags?

Would this work inside an organisation? Will it work here?

A lot of the questions look more like discussion-starters than Q&A candidates, to me. How does this do more than a good conversation medium with rich metadata?

Should I be asking these questions at Yahoo! Answers?