Collaborative Tools - Asia Commons
From Web4Dev 2006
Contents |
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Introduction
Show Slide: Title
- I'd like to tell the story of my team's use of collaborative tools through the planning and execution of a conference - Asia Commons: Asian Conference on the Digital Commons.
- Although the conference themes have relationships with those of this conference and I'd love to spend my 15 min. telling you all about the Asian Digital Commons, I will instead keep myself focussed on the topic at hand - the collaborative tools which were used to plan and execute a conference:
- the needs and conditions which lead to the use of a particular collaborative tool
- how we effectively used them and what were some of the challenges faced
- what similar tools we could have chosen
- Questions: Don't hesitate to interrupt me throughout the talk if you have any questions.
- Notes: Don't worry about jotting down too many notes during my talk, as you will find everything i'm saying in addition to references to the tools and concepts in the Web4Dev wiki which Mikel spoke about at http://www.brainoff.com/web4dev/
The Asia Commons experience can be broken down into 2 stories:
- A small group is working together to achieve something - the planning of the conference.
- A larger group connecting pre, post and during a face to face event - the conference participants.
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What is a Collaborative Tool?
Show Slide: Collaborative Tool = ... definition.
Collaborative Tool:
- Collaboration: "The act of working together with others to achieve a common goal." (Wiktionary)
- Tool: "A mechanical device intended to make a task easier." (Wiktionary)
Collaborative Tool = A device intended to make the act of working with others to achieve a common goal easier.
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Planning the Conference
- We had a geographically-disbursed team of 6 people in 3 different offices: 2 in Ottawa, 2 in Kathmandu and 2 in New Dehli.
- Within the planning team, there were varying comfort and interest levels with technology.
- There were also geeky technology-champion types such as myself within the team.
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Needs
Show Slide: 4 needs (titles only).
Communicate! Collaborate. Work together.
- Asynchronous (Non Real-time) Communication: Communicate regularly and continually as a team - due to time zone differences, practically every day communication needed to be asynchronous.
- Synchronous (Real-time) Communication: "Meet" regularly synchronously as a team on a weekly basis from our respective locations. Occasionally, one on one synchronous conversations were also very useful.
- Collaborative Documentation: Write descriptions, documentation, plan, brainstorm together.
- Share Online Resources: Share online resources which fit into the conference themes for collective learning.
As you can see, this experience can be generalized to be any group working together on a focussed task.
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Need #1: Asynchronous (non Real-time) Communication
Show: http://www.dgroups.org/groups/asiacommons-plan/
Chosen: A mailing list. Specifically, a Dgroups mailing list.
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Why a Mailing List?
- Fairly certain that everyone here is aware of what a mailing list is given that the web4dev community has one.
- A mailing list is very simple for the message senders and receivers.
- It uses a tool everyone already has - email.
- One list address goes to all list subscribers. Subscribers have messages "pushed" to them, no need for the team to go to one centralized location to see if a team member has posted a new message, it gets delivered directly to all of us.
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Why Dgroups?
- Dgroups is a shared service owned by a partnership of organisations which hosts mailing-list discussions for international development topics. Bellanet is a part of this partnership, therefore a natural choice for us.
- Familiarity with the tool within our group.
- Quick setup, no installation required - shared service.
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Tips on Effective Use
- There are a variety of ways which mailing lists can be used: discussion, distribution, short term, long term use, etc.
- In our case, the purpose was for discussion among a small team.
- As in any workplace group discussion, you often need a facilitator to keep the discussion on track. The same is true for a mailing list. One person should be identified as the discussion facilitator or administrator. This person will play the role of mediator when there are opposing viewpoints, summarize decisions and action items for the team from the discussion and generally keep the discussion on track.
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Similar Tools
- use as a shared service:
- Google Groups
- Yahoo Groups
- install in your environment and use:
- GNU Mailman
- Sympa
- web forum used by many community CMS - example: Drupal
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Need #2: Synchronous (Real-time) Communication
Show: Chatzilla #bellanet channel (or conference channel if there is one).
Chosen:
- Chat. Specifically: IRC (Internet Relay Chat) for team meetings and Yahoo Messenger for one-on-one chats.
- The IRC client which was used most in our team was Chatzilla given that it comes as a FireFox plug-in. Most in our team were already using Firefox and with some detailed instructions managed to install it and use it.
- Sometimes, the telephone. :)
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Why Chat/IM?
- Primarily: connectivity.
- Tele-conferences were attempted, doing the connections from Ottawa, but were inneffective due to quality of the lines and sometimes you couldn't get through, etc.
- Using voip such as Skype was not possible due to connectivity as well - skype is peer-to-peer and therefore its conferencing performance exponentially deteriorates.
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Why IRC?
- We attempted to use Yahoo for team chats, which is a feature of Yahoo, but discovered the mystery of the missing messages. We never discovered the reason for this, but I decided to move the team over to IRC.
- IRC was created in 1988 and is an open protocol mainly designed for many to many chat. I had a sense that it would not drop messages in our group chats.
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Why Yahoo Messenger?
- Familiarity: All team members were already using it as a tool to connect with colleagues in other offices.
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Tips on Effective Use
- For chat meetings to be effective, we discovered we needed to define a set of protocols for meeting facilitation to emulate the real life experience, without these, it was chaos. :)
- Just as with mailing lists, one person needs to be designated the meeting facilitator:
- to keep the meeting on track according to the agenda
- controls the 'speaking queue' for those wanting to speak
- We defined symbols for basic things:
- ! = lift up your hand to speak
- ... = you are not done speaking
- // = you are done speaking
- Expect this to take more time than a voice conference.
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Similar Tools
- Gaim and Trillian are clients which support multi-protocols
- Gaim
- Protocols: AIM, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, among others
- Trillian
- AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, among others
- Google Chat: Jabber
- Yahoo Messenger
- MSN Messenger
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Need #3: Collaborative Documentation
Show: http://wikis.bellanet.org/asiacommons-plan
Wiki. Specifically, a local Media Wiki install.
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Why a Wiki?
- Mikel has covered this topic, so I won't go into details.
- Contrast this with document files and track changes. A wiki enabled us to replace that and to keep our information in an organized way + versioning.
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Why Media Wiki?
- Familiarity and popularity: Bellanet has adopted it given that many are already familiar with the interface which is the same as Wikipedia's - Wikipedia uses the Media Wiki platform.
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Tips on Effective Use
- The wiki and mailing list were very complimentary mediums. Conversation on the mailing list led to final or polished products in the wiki.
- Some members who had smaller roles in our team never took to the wiki. This was ok - they stuck to sharing documents as attachments over the list. We didn't want to push the use of the tool within the team and allow some individuals to work in a way which was comfortable to them given that there was the complimentary mailing list which they were comfortable using.
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Similar Tools
- use as a shared service:
- WriteBoard, Wikia http://www.wikia.com/, Jotspot
- install in your environment and use:
- TWiki, TikiWiki,...
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Need #4: Share Online Resources
Show: http://del.icio.us/tag/IPR+development
Chosen: Social bookmarking. Specifically, del.icio.us.
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Why Social Bookmarking?
- Social bookmarking enables you store/manage your bookmarks online and associate them with 'tags' which are descriptor words.
- User-specified tagging is the heart of a folksonomy, "collaboratively-generated open-ended labels (tags) which describe the content" (Wikipedia). Contrast this with a taxonomy.
- Online resources can be aggregated according to descriptor tags, which is what our team decided to do.
- If we all used the same tags for these specific resources, then collaboratively we had a richer set of resources.
- If anyone else outside of our team also used these tags, then we had an even richer set of resources.
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Why del.icio.us?
- Familiarity: A few of us were already using it.
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Tips on Effective Use
- Ensure that team members have browser buttons to bookmark on your social bookmarking site. If it's not dead simple to use, then it won't be used.
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Similar Tools
- Furl
- Spurl
- many more...
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Conference Execution
To set the scence...
- Conference participants were from all over the Asia-Pacific region.
- We had an interest to include participants as much as we could who could not physically attend.
- We had connectivity limitations and an interest to keep things simple.
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Needs
Show Slide: 3 needs (titles only).
- Participant Communications: Communications before, during and after the conference for participants and those who were unable to physically attend.
- Individual Idea Sharing: Thoughts, reflections, ideas shared based on conference proceedings and discussions.
- Collaborative Note-Taking: Collaborative session note-taking.
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Need #1: Participant Communications
Show: participants list in email client
Chosen:
- Again, a mailing list was chosen. This time, the Sympa mailing list manager was chosen instead of Dgroups.
- I won't go into this case in too much detail as i've already discussed mailing lists, but wanted to highlight it as this was a slightly different use of a mailing list.
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Why Sympa?
- Idealogical reasons. Dgroups, chosen previously for conference planning, uses proprietary technology for its mailing list manager. Proprietary technology went against the conference themes. It would be like serving beef at a conference on the vegan diet. :D
- Sympa, however, is open source and had very similar features to a Dgroups mailing list, although without the Dgroups interface, which wasn't required.
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Tips on Effective Use
- Due to the large number of participants, we decided to make this a moderated list initially, meaning an administrator/facilitator will screen messages before they go out to the list. This prevents messages sent in error from going to the whole list or someone sending a message to the wider list which only has value for 1 or 2 others.
- We held a pre-conference discussion with a set of weekly questions to guide the discussion. We found this an effective method to get participants talking and "breaking the ice" before participants met face to face.
- The list now lacks a facilitator to spark discussion and it shows - the list has turned into from discussion to distribution.
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Need #2: Individual Idea Sharing
Show: http://www.asia-commons.net
Chosen: A blog. Specifically, we chose the Drupal CMS due because we knew it could handle blogs very well.
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Why Blogs?
- Many of you may be wondering how blogs can be considered collaborative due to their individual nature.
- The majority of blogging software enables conversations to happen through features such as trackbacks, where one blog entry referring to another is tracked, comments and RSS. This creates more of a feeling of conversation within the blogosphere.
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Why Drupal?
- Drupal is a very popular open source CMS and was a natural choice for conference community site.
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Tips on Effective Use
- Encouraging blogging:
- We didn't have high expectations for blog posts, but it ended up being a popular thing for many conference participants to try. We put no moderation or filtering, and posts would go directly to the front page of the conference community site.
- Blog entries should not be too lengthy or wordy, but just enough to get your point across.
- Frequent paragraph breaks and adding small photos increase readability.
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Similar Tools
- install in your environment and use:
- Wordpress
- Serendipity
- use as a shared service:
- Blogger
- TypePad
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Need #3: Collaborative Note-Taking
Show: http://wikis.bellanet.org/asia-commons/
Chosen: Wiki! Again, we used Media Wiki.
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Why a wiki?
- As Mikel explained, wikis are magical for collaborative editing and this only made sense.
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Tips on Effective Use
- Getting a large group of individuals in one location to use the wiki and see the value of doing so was no small task.
- It required a set of computers to be present in the room for those who didn't have a laptop and someone always available to "hand-hold" anyone unfamiliar with wikis through the process.
- Seeing the value of the wiki meant seeing the value of collaboration - that notes submitted and revised by many were more accurate and richer than they would be had they been completed by one person.
- Personal profiles of participants appeared on the site and several expressed concern about people editing their personal information and why were edits permitted and not moderated, etc. My experience has shown that putting up barriers for all to stop potential abuse from a select few will not foster use for the many.
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In Conclusion...
- Assess and understand your needs and choose tools which are:
- familiar
- easy to use - the simpler the better
- easily available - supported in your technology environment
- more importantly: useful - technology should never be introduced if it is seen as an accessory, something which is cool but has little value or usefullness
- We found that having technology champions who can provide support and instructions on effective use of the tools was extremely important.
