Glacial Erratics

Over in BlueOxen land EugeneEricKim, to inspire discussion, has inquired why we think we need better collaboration. I went off to think about this, and ended up with an answer that is a bit tangential but relevant. It's about what I might like to do with Community and Collaboration oriented tools. The needs they might satisfy. We'll see where this goes.    (267)

(This, intentionally, is not a description of reality in all its lovable muddiness, but rather an abstract description of how things could be. There is no clear line between what is a community and what is a collaboratory and the containment of a collaboratory in a community will often not be the case, with collaborators spanning multiple communities and roles frequently changing.)    (268)

A recent survey to the members of the BlueOxenCollaboratory and surrounding conversation suggests that there is a significant difference between a community and a collaboratory.    (269)

A community might be defined as a group of people who have some kind of shared large activity, ethic or mission that connects them at some level. The participants get together in some fashion to talk, to ramble, to tell stories--to communicate.    (26A)

All this communication helps to build understanding among the participants, make and strengthen connections between the people, attract new participants and flesh out the shared thing that connects them.    (26B)

The BlueOxenCollaboratory is a community of people who share the belief and mission that collaboration can and should be improved.    (26C)

When a group within a community crystallizes a set of goals (from all that communicating they've been doing) on which they wish to make progress and to which they commit, that group is collaborating.    (26D)

Collaboration is an event in time that is bounded in time. A collaborative event has actionable goals whose completion indicates an end to that phase of the collaboration. (It is often the case, however, that goals are added to an effectively collaborating group, extending the life of the group.)    (26E)

Participants may come and go from a collaborating group, while still remaining in the community that contains the group. Participation in the collaborating group, though, is dependent on an active commitment to the group's goals.    (26F)

Goals at the community level are general and loose and may be better labeled as missions: improving collaboration, ridding the world of poverty, that sort of thing.    (26G)

Goals at the collaboratory level are more specific and actionable: creating a wiki that supports PurpleNumbers, raising N million dollars to create political ads for a particular campaign. These goals can be decomposed to tasks that can be assigned and to which someone can commit.    (26H)

The communication activity of a progressive community is sometimes devoted to discerning the issues which inform the creation of goals on which members of the community can collaborate. Because the issues are often not clear a lot of time may be spent trying to figure out what is being talked about.    (26I)

Community oriented tools help the community do what it does: communicate; build networks of people; and build and inform a shared ontology, understanding or mission. Therefore, the primary goal of community oriented tools is to facilitate the exploratory and discursive communication that answers questions such as:    (26J)

• Who are we?    (26K)
• What do we think?    (26L)
• What makes us a group?    (26M)
• How did we get here?    (26N)
• What does the world look like to us?    (26O)
• What do we want the world to look like?    (26P)

A conscientious community knows that the communication they create is full of good stuff and wishes to reuse it. Therefore the tools which help transport this communication should provide:    (26Q)

• GranularAddressability    (26R)
• Identification (who said what as well as who is who)    (26S)
• Multiple modes of organization    (26T)
  • Indexing    (26U)
  • Searching    (26V)
  • Browsing along multiple dimensions    (26W)
  • Categories    (26X)
• Annotation    (26Y)
  • Notes and comments    (26Z)
  • Dynamic categories    (270)

(It occurs to me that I'm recapitulating some of the goals of the HeliumProject and the UvizProject. I hadn't originally thought of that.)    (271)

Once a community has crystallized a goal or goals and some participants have made a commitment, the new collaborating subgroup needs a suite of tools that operate within and provide access to the existing communication space of the community. The tools create a space within the larger community space with highly permeable boundaries and provide for the following activities:    (272)

• Answering:    (273)
  • What is our goal or goals (for the group).    (274)
  • What are my tasks (for the individual).    (275)
• Showing:    (276)
  • Documents relevant to the goal(s).    (277)
• Allowing:    (278)
  • The specification and evaluation of:    (279)
    • Requirements    (27A)
    • Tasks    (27B)
  • Tracking of task milestones    (27C)
  • The assignment of relevancy to documents.    (27D)

The primary goals of these tools are to allow a participant to know, with little question:    (27E)

• Where they are    (27F)
• Where they've been    (27G)
• Where they need to go    (27H)

The tools act as a directing roadmap while providing as much on demand context as possible. Cognitive stress about what's to be done is offloaded into the tool environment so effort can be focused on the task at hand.    (27I)

Many tool siutes attempt to address most of these needs but seem to fall down in the provision and importance of context. Being able to access the context of a community or a collaborating group is crucial to having a high-resolution picture of what's going on. Tools and processes (such as setting up a PurpleNetwork) help but there is always the hard work of simply keeping up. That hard work has to be acknowledged as a valid (and time consuming) portion of anyone's responsibilities.    (27J)