Library clips

A while back I mentioned that I like the idea that after a conference, conference-call, presentation, meeting, workshop, etc…you can continue the conversations online.

For a big conference like the Web 2.0 Expo, they used CrowdVine as a social networking tool…I’ve posted about it before. And of course this same tool can be used to continue the conversation once the conference is over. Vyew is another tool that saves your conference in a book where you can continue to collaborate and discuss asynchronously, it also has a widget so this book can be embedded anywhere.
Stewart Mader suggests a wiki rather than a conference showbag.

What I found in my last conference call is that most of what we talked about in the call can also be done online, in our community page, when we are not present at the same time (asynchronous).

These are three types of things we did in the conference call, that cover blogs, forums, and wikis:

1. News, and status around the globe from each team member [BLOG]

Each team member had a turn to update the team on their status

- why do this in the conference call, when we can subscribe to the group status blog, or each others personal blogs
- any conversation can be carried out in the comments
- all can read and/or take part in conversations on their own time
- this saves time on the call to do other stuff
- to recall something just go to the blog archive

This is put nicely from the wiki perspective by the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein case study:

“The teleconference used to be one and a half hours long, with much time wasted on bringing people up to speed on the week’s events. Now team members update themselves on the wiki, and that part of the teleconference takes five to ten minutes.

The rest of the teleconference is used for ideas generation, being innovative, talking about problems and looking at solutions, which is what the meeting should be about. It shouldn’t be about updating people as to what’s happened, but thinking about our clients and how we can service them.”

2. Discussion about issues people had since the last call [FORUM]

The team was asked if there was anything to discuss.

This is what a conference call is all about…conversation.

But, we should not wait for a conference call to discuss things, why not use the community forums everyday.

3. Brainstormed an idea for better usability for one of our systems [WIKI]

What we basically did was come up with a list for things to appear in a drop down menu, that would cover all reasons when a user logs a support call.

It was good to do this synchronously as we could discuss whilst we made the list, nothing beats this.

But I’m sure we could of started this list in a wiki, and used the comments for discussion, and then perhaps join the conference call to finalise our list.

Summary

I realised in one meeting that we covered the use of 3 of the most important social tools.

Why do we need so many meetings, when we can be collaborating and conversing perpetually?

The more we use social tools, the shorter our meetings can be.

Nothing beats synchronous group chats to discuss out issues, but we can sometimes do most of this discussion, updates, and collaboration online, and call a short meeting to finalise and action our findings.

Next time I talk about social tools adoption, I can tell people you are doing it anyway, only this is doing the same thing when we are not all in the same room.

We can still collaborate, discuss, update when we are not in the same room.

The fact is people are fine to physically participate in informing their status and what they’ve been up to, discuss issues, and collaborate…but when it comes to doing this online they feel weird being social (open and visibility). Instead they use email as it’s more closed and private, and they do all three things with email (status, discuss, collaborate) that they do in person at a meeting, it’s like email is their asynchronous voice.

Part of the adoption process is to help people get over the awkwardness of being social online, we have to guide them by informing them social tools are not extra work, it’s what you are doing anyway.

Rough Example 1

“In a meeting you share your status, well here is a blog to do the exact same thing…you can even share any experiences, or whatever you like here.” (Above-the-Flow)

“In a meeting you take part in discussions, well here is a forum to do the exact same thing.”

“In a meeting we collaborate and brainstorm, well here is a wiki to do the exact same thing.”

“Email is for private correspondence, whereas these three tools above are the online version for what we do in meetings.”

“An easy way to think about it, is if it’s not private information, then a community tool can be used. The next step is to work out whether you need a blog, forum or wiki.”

“Please use these three tools when the context of what you want to do is about, status/experience, discussion, or collaboration.”

“These social tools will live in a community website, which assimilates our meeting room, this allows us to still communicate and work together when we are not in meetings.”

Using the approach above we are introducing social tools not for the heck of it, or as a knowledge sharing drive, etc…
We are introducing them to solve issues specific issues, that way people will be more serious about them, and these are issues that effect the whole enterprise.

If the reason of introducing social tools was-we need to collaborate more, and share knowledge-people are going to say “yeah, I’ve heard that before”, “I’m not sharing what I know” (power/trust), and “I haven’t got time”.

Instead if we put it across as solving particular issues, it is received in a more welcoming way, as it’s like we are going to deploy tools that we help them with their problems…it doesn’t come across like we want something out of them as much.

Rough Example 2

“The company is experiencing email stress, as part of this company-wide problem we are introducing communities and social tools in order to relieve this email overload.”

“The company is also wanting to save money on global conference calls, and save people’s time by making these calls shorter and less frequent by using community tools.”

“Within a community will be status diaries, discussion forums, and group brainstorming pages.
Please use these tools in replacement of less time spent in meeting, and please don’t use email if you want to have a group discussion, brainstrorm/collaborate or tell others about your status…instead use the correct community tool.”

“Our introduction of communities are intended to help tackle two serious issues in our enterprise that effect everyone: email and meeting overload. Please use communities for any of these three types of action, rather than email or having yet another meeting.”

“These are two serious issues affecting everyone in the company, and if we don’t all do the right thing, we won’t be able to overcome our issues. The company is one big group, and if a few seeds ignore this message, it will spoil the intentions and dynamics of the group. So remember your behaviour is going to affect the whole.”

“As part of this initiative we will be looking at recognising people and groups that use communities, we feel there will be self recognition anyway. We will also look into this as being incorporated into our company aims, and job performance reviews.”

“To kick all this off I introduce the whole office to the “Office community”, the only communication via email will be a notification to visit an entry at the “Office community”.”

“Business units, interest groups, and task rooms will be set up on request in order to use community tools to get your work done.”

I’m more for a viral bottom-up approach, but even so at some stage you may want to get the message out to the whole company. Perhaps have it in your back pocket in case the bottom-up approach isn’t quite working as expected.

This office-wide approach has to be repeated to staff within their own teams, community leaders will be champions, facilitators, role models…

From the above example I did not once mention: social, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, knowledge sharing, collaboration (oops, I did mention this), we need to capitialise on opportunities for competitive advantage, getting stuff out of people’s heads, blogs, wikis…
Instead I raised issues like email overload and shorter/less meetings (time) that can be alleviated using social tools.

The sell is about not doing anything extra, it’s only offering substitute tools, it’s focused on specific problems, and it hopes to come across as doing people a favour to help them work less frustrated.

To finish up here’s an excerpt by JP Rangaswami in relation to Facebook, but to me it covers what social tools and the use of communities are all about, this is the engagement we are trying to achieve…social productivity by leveraging the social capital:

“…you’ve taken what happened at the water cooler or at the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it learnable […] Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work, and what people do as part of that work […] to look at the flows that matter rather than the flows of the politics”

We are piloting communities at work, the gist of it is:

Blog - broadcast, experience, ideas, feedback, status
Forum - discussion
Wiki- collaborate, document, website

Step 1

The concept is, it’s much easier to do work using these new tools rather than using email to do all three of these things (broadcast, discuss, collaborate).

Let’s not mention that content is open and centralised for others to see, all have a voice, conversation can evolve into new knowledge, tune into your social filter to ask questions and finds things…pretty much a way to get things done.

Plus all your interactions, contributions, and readings happen in a contextual place. If I want to see the forum contributions I have made on the KM forum, I just go to the KM CoP, or goto my personal dashboard.

For me this beats trying to find this stuff in my email. I like my content to live in context eg. comments about a wiki to be in the wiki itself rather than be separated (disconnected) in my email client.

Jack Vinson talks about context as providing you with a “frame of reference”, he says:

“The better I understand the particular frame of reference (context), the better I can understand what this information or knowledge means.”

This is kind of different to the context I’m talking about. I’m talking about the context of a place, he is talking about seeing data in a context setting (even better if it’s a familiar setting) to help you use your current knowledge to create new information…I guess metaphor is another way.

In a way it does relate to what I’m talking about as reading a forum reply you found in your email, makes much more sense when you see it in the bigger picture of the actual forum.

Anyway so I call the use of our communities as Step 1.

We can now learn to use social tools to get work done with much less confusion, and of course this creates a perpetual open dialogue where knowledge is continuously created and re-used in the open.

Another benefit is that you end up with less email to deal with, as now what would of been email lives at the context of the place (as a blog post/comment, forum topic/reply, wiki contribution/comment).

Although, without an inbox for each community (private messages), one-to-one messages are done in email. I’d rather these emails as private or public messages that live in context, ie. at the community…see more.

Step 2

Does this really give you less email to deal with…I don’t think so.

It’s great we are attempting to no longer just rely on the intelligence of the email system to do our work, these social tools enable us to work easier and content is no longer siloed (a centralised and flowing corporate memory). But we are still using email.

How? Notifications, that’s how.

In our communities we currently have RSS disabled for some reason, maybe it’s a good thing for now, to prevent scaring people with too much new stuff to absorb.

For each blog and forum you can get new content delivered as a new email, and this is not just a notification, it’s the full-text of the blog post or forum topic.
When you subscribe to a blog or forum you are also subscribed to blog comments and forum replies (personally I’d like a choice).

Also, each blog post and each forum topic has an email address.
This means when you get an email for a new blog post, you can hit reply and it will post your comment to the blog…nice one.

You can also publish a new blog post by writing a new email and sending it to the blog email address (you can include non-subscribers to your blog in the to: or cc: field, that way they will get the content even though they don’t subscribe to your blog…nifty!)

OK, first thing.

I really like this email interoperability, it’s bringing the use of new tools to people’s comfort zone. But at the same time I would also like people to visit the actual community to experience the whole realm. There’s more chance you are going to read something else or contribute, if you are at the community itself.

So right now, this email interoperability is both good and bad.

The more concerning issue that some people have been talking about in the forums is since the introduction of communities they are getting just as much email.

They allude to “what’s the difference to my inbox overload if someone writes an email or publishes a blog post which I get in email anyway…isn’t communities meant to help with the inbox firehose.”
They also mention that community content gets lost in their inbox amongst all other types of emails.

This just screams RSS Reader.

But it also may scream our community Watchlist page.

The Watchlist page is a stream of the lastest stuff you are subscribed to, so throughout the day you can go to this page to see what’s new in the stream. The saves you visiting every blog and forum that you like from every community you like…instead it’s in one personalised page.
But I think I have to have an email subscription in order for this stuff to be on my Watchlist…darn (gotta look into this).

Whether it’s a Watchlist or an RSS Reader, it becomes a second dashboard.
You have your email dashboard and your what’s happening dashboard.

You can read RSS feeds within your email, but the idea is that email is a tool for personal correspondence, and that’s it, and an RSS Reader is a tool for the latest updates.

Perhaps a startpage could combine both into one dashboard, or Outlook could have an RSS Reader module that is just as important as the email inbox…in fact Outlook would no longer be an email client, it would be a personal productivity dashboard.

Conclusion

At the moment we are in the pre-introductory stage of Step 1. - a social way of doing work
(lots of learning, and culture change issues to go with this)

We also need to be prepared for Step 2.

And it’s Step 2. that may win the KM team acclaim in reducing the common email overload problem.

Any department that can reduce the email overload problem is going to get kudo’s, will it be the KM team.

Luis Suarez is creating a wave of interest in his self administered email detox rehab program

He links to one of my posts on examples of re-purposing email, in this post I want to talk about more tricky situations.

Invites

Blogs, wikis, and forums enable us to work socially and keep up to date using RSS Readers.

But email still has to be used to invite people to a new forum, a new blogger on the block, a new wiki set-up for an event, etc…

Luis talks about email just being for one-to-one sensitive correspondence…well invites are not sensitive and you’d want to broadcast an invite to a lot of people. So what to do?

Email is not alone here, blasting a private message to a list in your Facebook private messages is no different.

Although it is slightly different if you blast a private message within a topic community, this is like having numerous email inboxes, one for each community, and they each live at the community site.
But still with lots of inboxes you need some sort of dashboard to be notified on what’s going on, is email this dashboard, most of the time yes.

What I can think of is for each community or business unit to have a news blog, this blog can announce an invite to a new blog, wiki event, etc… This is the only way I see of bypassing email.

But what if that invite to a new wiki event is only intended for a few people in the community, the rest of the members have to put up with seeing the blog post even though is doesn’t really concern them.
You wouldn’t have got this occupational spam using email as it wouldn’t of been sent to non-relevant people, in this case a blog is causing more occupational spam in your RSS Reader, than spam in your email inbox.
This is the whole reason for my post on mesh blogs.

Tasks

My idea of mesh blogs also applied to tasks. Since a mesh blog is a specific blog set up for a two way audience, a member of one sub-team can post tasks to this blog without feeling they are spamming other sub-teams. The recipient can leave comments or create new posts to the sender as clarification, status, etc…

But what happens when the task is only for one or two people?

If a task was posted in a mesh blog for the support and tech team to communicate, then the one member of the tech team (sender) and the one or two members (recipients) of the support team are not going to be the only people who get this post. All members of both these sub-teams will get this post plus subsequent posts.

The only answer I can see is setting up a blog for each task, this way you don’t need to spam anyone.

Like Luis says, you could use a wiki, forum, or a blog for tasks. If it was a bigger task you could have a community or room so you can use all these tools.

In the end these are better than email as you can collaborate easier and it’s centralised in an open archive, rather than email siloes. This documented trail is knowledge sharing by doing work, there is no extra effort in having to think and share your knowledge for the greater good…and hopefully others can see your documented activity and re-use it, rather than re-inventing the wheel.

But why not use a task management tool to do the job, such as Lotus Connections (Activities)…I’d like to hear Luis’s progress on this addition to his program.

Anyway, whatever system is used, the idea is to use an RSS Reader for progress updates, or the dashboard widget itself.

On-the-fly conversation

The idea of a task is a unique communication between two or more parties to get a job done. An existing channel like a blog or wiki may not exist for this task, so a new one may need to be created, no matter how small or temporarily.

I find on-the-fly conversations in a very similar area.
In a past post I explained the difficulty in using existing blogs or forums to have a discussion that may only last 2 or 3 back and forth communications.
Basically you only want specific people to be in the discussion (perhaps privacy or simply courtesy of not spamming them), and setting up a forum for a very brief discussion can seem too much compared to sending an email.

But as mentioned earlier, at least the discussion can be re-used by others as it is visible.

I think in this situation email could be used if setting up a forum is too much work, unless the first email you send automatically sets up the forum. And subsequent back and forth emails are threaded into the open forum. With this system you can still use email for the discussion as it’s posted to a public space at the same time, or you could just go to that public space and post there, and subscribe to the feed for updates.

I covered this in a blog post a long time ago, once of the tools that seems to fit the bill is 9cays.

Basically you email people and 9cays…9cays will send people an email invite. When the reply to emails it will also appear at an public or private space, and this space is pretty much one blog post and comments.

Hmm, 9cays could be used for tasks.

Email the task to a worker and 9cays, and then just back and forth discuss via email or at the blog post comments, in the end you have a central place to house this (yeah for no email silos).

Rooms

Either a task or an on-the-fly forum, I think, is seen as it’s own thing. It may not be related to a community, but you still need to be able to use social community tools.
I feel that templates that are used to set up a community can be stripped down to a basic template to serve task requirements. And unlike a community, you would not need to request a task (room) space, any user can just set one up in one click.
Setting up a task room needs to be as accessible and easy as sending an email, otherwise people won’t use them.

So next time a few others and yourself have a task, don’t use email, instead set up a room in one click. You will have an instant blog, forum, wiki and document folder to do your work.
Others can eavesdrop, subscribe to or visit your room to keep in the loop.

Next time someone needs to do a similar task (perhaps the person who did the original task has left the company), they can re-use the knowledge that lives in the task room.

Next time you come off a cross business unit conference call and want to keep the discussion going online for about 2 weeks, don’t worry about trying to find the right CoP to use, just set up a room.

Yeah, no email siloes.

Plus the task information you are going to re-use isn’t just a deliverable, it includes all the workings out from blog posts, forum discussions, and wiki collaborations…now that’s tacitastic!

The reason I’m harping on about tasks is that sure you can get people using communities to do work rather than email silos, but quite often work is done as a task by just a few people…and your communications and collaborations in a community may feel like you are spamming these people.

At our work we are starting to use communities to leverage the social captial and get away from email, but I’m finding task work is still done in email, that’s why I see “rooms” (with social tools) as another way to use tools that are more appropriate than email.

For those of you who love email, please adhere to two.sentenc.es

In a past post I talked about Re-purposing email, and after that I was going to give some examples, but I got sidetracked on what blogs an enterprise would have when it would come to communications, see Enterprise blog channels for communications.

If these examples seem universal, then perhaps we can start a “Re-purposing email wiki”…I’m sure Luis Suarez would agree.

Emails are not just about communications, sometimes they are about collanoration, tasks, sharing tips, etc…

This post is not just focusing on communication type blog posts, in fact it’s not focusing on blogs at all. It’s going through example emails and proposing how that email could be re-purposed.

What I have done is listed the email under the social tool it could of been delivered in.
Any notes have been denoted by an (*).

BLOG (team/project/personal/office-wide/community)

Announce

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:IT
A new security patch on 25-12-07 will be implemented when you login, please let the PC do it’s thing

* This is an easy one, the general IT Office blog

To:OFFICE TEAM LEADS
From:Training Lead
We are running courses, on Access database training, please ask your team members if they are interested.

* All my boss would have to do is publish a blog post on our Team blog pointing to the post on the Corporate Training blog
- this would work as she would be subscribed to the CorporateTraining blog, and we would be subscribed to the Team blog
- in fact if I came across the training blog post (if I had access), I could potentially know before she even told me

To:TEAM and 2 other closely related teams
From: TEAM LEADER
A new banner and overview sheet has been included in our toolkit.
Please let others know.

* Perhaps this could be posted to our Team External blog, where we publish stuff that other team leads can see
- since our team and other team leads subscribe to this blog we will all be in the know
- each team lead can then let their members know by posting a brief blog post on their Team blogs, pointing to our TeamExternal blog.

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:IT
There is now a colour printer in the office

* This is an easy one, the general IT Office blog

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:Admin
Please welcome the new global manager for “social software” (hehe)

* This is an easy one, the general Office blog

To:PROJECT TEAM
From: A Project unit manager
The new project workspace has been set up at this URL.
Here is the getting started overview.

* This is an easy one, the general Project blog

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
Here are the usage statistics for December

* This could be published on the Team blog
- then again this may be of no value to the Development team, or another sub-team, this is what lead me to my post on mesh blogs

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:Admin
The trains are on strike this afternoon, you will need to make alternate arrangements

* This is an easy one, the general Office blog

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:Admin
A staff member was mentioned in the national newspaper today for a job well done on one of our projects

* This is an easy one, the general Office blog

To:PROJECT TEAM
From: A Project unit manager
Our main repository does not support media files, please assist clients by using this alternative

* This is an easy one, the general Project blog

Status

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:IT
We are having problems with internet access, we are speaking to our providers to resolve this

* This is an easy one, the general IT Office blog

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:IT
The internet is now working

* This is an easy one, the general IT Office blog

Work

To:SUB-TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
If anyone is interested, here is a workaround to this problem

* Perhaps this could be posted to a Sub-Team blog,
- other sub-teams in the team can subscribe if they like

To:SUB-TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
The solution to this issue was a setting in Outlook

* Perhaps this could be posted to a Sub-Team blog,
- other sub-teams in the team can subscribe if they like

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
I’m finding I’m learning a lot about our industry in Africa from my work on this deliverable….

* Perhaps this could be posted to a Sub-Team blog or personal blog
- others can subscribe if they like

FORUM (team/project/personal/office-wide/community)

Question

To:OFFICE-WIDE
From:Admin
We are looking for someone to offer their expertise on….

* Perhaps this could posted in a few community forums
- this way the whole office is not spammed

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
Does anyone know how to do this excel formula…

* Perhaps this could posted to your team forum
- otherwise search for an excel or Office tips community that may have an excel wiki or excel blog

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
Where can I find a file for our team logo?

* Perhaps this could posted to your team forum
- or IM blast a portion of your network

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
What do people think of Windows Vista, what are your experiences?

* Perhaps this could posted to your team forum, or a community forum, it depends which audience you want to ask

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
Where would I find information on…

* Perhaps this could posted to your team forum, or a community forum, it depends which audience you want to ask

To:PROJECT TEAM
From:1 PROJECT TEAM MEMBER
Does anyone want to car pool, I live outer eastern suburbs?

* Perhaps this could posted to the project forum, or the office forum, it depends which audience you want to ask
- or IM blast a portion of your network

IM

To:WORKER
From:WORKER
Can I use the Adobe writer on your computer?

* This is a quick question that can easily be done in IM, rather than an email in each inbox

To:WORKER
From:WORKER
I forgot to ask you was it cold when you were just outside…I’m about to go out.

* This is a quick question that can easily be done in IM, rather than an email in each inbox

To:WORKER
From:WORKER
The conference is about to start, where are you?

* This is a quick question that can easily be done in IM, rather than an email in each inbox

To:WORKER
From:WORKER
Are you free for a chat, I have 3 others that are free now.

* This is a quick question that can easily be done in IM, rather than an email in each inbox

WIKI

Collaborate

To:4 TEAM MEMBERS
From:TEAM LEADER
Can you all make a list of issues and email them to me and I will put them in one big list

* This could be a wiki task, see my post

To:4 TEAM MEMBERS
From:WORKER
Can you all review this attachment and send me the changes

* This could be a wiki task

To:4 TEAM MEMBERS
From:WORKER
Sorry, here’s another addition to the meeting agenda

* This could easily be added to the meeting agenda wikipage without emailing people

Knowledgebase

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
If anyone is interested, here is a workaround to this problem

* This could easily be added to the solutions wiki
- or perhaps Tips and Tricks blog

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
I can’t find the documentation on…where is it kept

* This wouldn’t happen if there was a centralised team wiki or a wiki that lists documents in the repository
- otherwise ask the question in the team forums

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
When you load this in the database remember to change this element as the template is not yet fixed.
This is not documented in the procedures.

* This is a reply-email to someone who didn’t need to send the email request if there was a Workarounds wiki or blog
- otherwise ask the question in the team forums

Event

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
I can’t find the email for when that workshop is taking place

* This wouldn’t happen if there was an Event wiki
- otherwise ask the question in the forums

To:TEAM
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
The workshop is kicking off today.
Here is the agenda.
This person cannot make it.
I will further email you the presentation attachments

* This wouldn’t happen if there was an Event wiki, with a wiki blog
- perhaps a community could be set-up for the workshop

Task

To: SUB-TEAM
From: 1 TEAM MEMBER
Could everyone please sign off that the new features have been tested and work

* This could be a wiki task, and perhaps posted on the wiki task blog
- rather than once person sending out an email to about 10 people with an attachment
- then each person sending back an email to say they have actioned it

To:7 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
The test server will be going down for 3 days to be patched.
I will let you know the moment it is back up

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community

To:3 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER
I am currently at stage 3 of my report, I’m now doing field research for stage 4.
Tomorrow I will fly to China, and need to find accomodation.
I will meet with client and let you know of the results.

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community

To: SUB TEAM
From: TEAM LEADER
A new advanced editing feature will be rolled-out on 25-12-07
Please test this and report back.

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community

To:3 TEAM MEMBERS
From:1 TEAM MEMBER

The server has been set up and the program installed, you can now proceed.
I had issues with the subscription module, so it’s not installed yet

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community
- only members of this community will be subscribed saving other team members not having to be spammed
- so in fact this example is more a project communication, rather than a team communication
- I think it’s important that quick short-lived communities are set up to achieve tasks

To:1 TEAM MEMBER
From: TEAM LEADER
Can you please do this task, and report back and then contact Bill do take it onwards.

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community
- just have to put up with other subscribers of the blog getting this post that is only intended for one person

To:1 TEAM MEMBER
From: TEAM LEADER
Can you please update the appendix on this report

* This could perhaps be posted on the wiki task blog
- or if it’s part of a bigger picture like a project where the wiki and blog could be in a community
- just have to put up with other subscribers of the blog getting this post that is only intended for one person

I’m finding with a lot of these tasks a more focused tool like Activities from Lotus Connections would be more appropriate.
Or a commuity or wiki that has social networking so you can message a member in the inbox of that wiki task, rather than your email inbox.
This way the task request is not separate from the task itself, you would only get a notification in your email inbox or perhaps a dashboard to alert you of your task.
It’s also bringing to mind Foldera…but then again there are heaps of task, workflow type tools.

The ultimate scenario is for a team to have a community site that includes:
- sub-communities
- social networking
- blogs
- forums
- wikis
- IM
- tasks

All your work and communications are together. The idea is not to have stuff in your email related to where the work lives, it should all be open and together…no siloes and no people out of the loop.

What actually is the email inbox?

It can be the latest private correspondence, news, questions, announcements, conversations, document collaboration, tasks, notifications etc…

This is a lot of different types of content coming into the one stream, where it’s hard to sort out priority, and also hard to organise what you’ve done, what the status is on what your doing, and where to find what your working on.

My post, Instead of sending an email…, poses that a better way is to receive this content in context
eg. IM for quick questions, forums for discussion, blogs for know-how and communications, wikis for collaboration, RSS for notifications, etc…

Now you have various places to go to do your work…email can be used for one-to-one private correspondence and for invite links
eg. you are invited to collaborate on this wiki, here is the link

Instead of getting an email about project status, a new forum topic, I check my RSS Reader where I subscribe to blogs and forums.

This has split my email inbox stream into various other services, and most of the time I can reply or take part within these other services.

And of course this content is in the open for all to benefit from, for conversation to evolve the content, and I can discover people, connect and learn.

Email stress is something that is relevant to everyone, but what are people doing about it besides re-appropriating content elsewhere as I have suggested above?

There are lots of ways to be productive to keep your inbox down, but this is still putting up with the firehose problem, you are just putting up with the problem by implementing a nifty method to deal with it. Why should you have to deal with it, why not treat the cause?

A comment I left on one of my blog posts, referncing Jack Vinson, is that the real issue is the “input problem”. Email is just a tool, it’s the way we are using it, that’s stressing us. What has to happen is a policy, rule, social norm on group behaviour using emails. If you tell Bill to use a blog or IM sometimes instead of email, then you don’t need to solve your inbox problem as Bill is doing it for you, by re-purposing the content in the first place.

We don’t use RSS Readers at my work, we are using email to subscribe to blogs and forums. This is OK as you can post replies and comments from within your email, you can even post a forum topic and blog post via email…people like this.
We are in the open, having conversations, discovering people, creating serendipity, which is doing the right thing as we are leveraging the social capital, creating a corporate memory, creating conditions for emergence, etc…
We are starting to collaborate with wikis.
NOTE: this is not enterprise wide, we are in pilot mode

Even though I still have the problem of all this stuff (notifications) coming into my inbox, at least it doesn’t live in my inbox, at least I’m not actioning stuff as a new email. Once I read the email I delete it, as I know where the content lives.

One other benefit I forsee is that when people get the hang of blogs, I won’t be pushed so much stuff anymore, I can choose to subscribe by email. We already have an issue with a flooded inbox with stuff that’s relevant, last thing I want is occupational spam.

Another option over the RSS Reader subscription model is to have profiles and be able to network by subscribing to people:
- your profile
- what your subscriptions are doing

Luis Suarez’s email detox posts and podcasts (and another) are a perfect example of this re-purposing email for both personal well being and social benefit.

One thing that stuck in my mind is when Luis said he was sick of answering the same question all the time.
- he would rather answer a question once in a community forum or blog post where it is visible, and allow people to search or be pointed to it
- if the question was asked in public perhaps others could see it and answer it if Luis was unavailable, or didn’t know the amswer himself

This is similar to our support database where people log calls…if I can’t answer a call or I’m absent at least someone else can see it in the cue.
When people email a call, I have been instructed to ask them to log the call, please.

Luis is proposing this concept to any sort of question, just search the blogs or forums, if no luck then choose a forum to ask the question, or ask your network.

He is also doing what I do with support calls that are emailed to me, he is letting people know that what they just emailed him could of been done by IM, or a forum topic, or a blog post, or a wiki, etc…and he is letting them know by using this social tool to deliver the message.

Since our community pilot I have been doing the same.
Everytime I get an email that is an announcement I remind that person that they could have blogged it.
Everytime I get an email that is a question or discussion query I remind that person that they could have posted a forum topic.
Everytime I get an email that requires a more synchronous feel I ring that person or answer using IM.
Everytime I get and email that asks to collaborate on something I inform that person that we can use a wiki.

My intention is that once all community leaders discipline their members, they will hopefully re-habitualise (is that a word?) people into using the right tool for the right job.

Another thing that came across is that “email detox” is a great selling term to get people social online. Email stress affects everyone, and a process/program to help with that is a great disguise for getting social tools adopted. It will soon be realised that email detox is just a by product of social tools, and the real benefit is being connected.

What if you want to annouce something and some people you want to reach don’t subscribe to the blog?

Firstly if it’s a team blog, perhaps you could subscribe the group email to the blog.
But sometimes a team announcement may affect another party, in a past post I suggested that if you can post a blog my email, just include these other people in the address bar as well.
The end of the email can contain a link to the blog homepage so these people are aware that the content is archived, and not siloed.

How do I share links with people?

If I want to share a link with a friend that is not private correspondence, how do I do it?
- and what if she doesn’t subscribe to my bookmarks, or what if I haven’t bookmarked this link anyway, but I just want to tell them about it

This is what I like about the Facebook comment wall…I can share a link with one person, but it’s public.
- others can see it when they visit that page
- others will be aware of this via their News feed.

What about if I want to share a link or an email someone sent me, with three other people?

I wonder what Luis does for this type of communication.

Wiki idea

I’m thinking perhaps we should do something similar to Andrew McAfee’s latest post with example scenarios of when a social tool would be beneficial.

Perhaps we can create a wiki for re-purposing email examples:
- blog
- forum
- wiki
- IM
- tasks

And also have wikipages for each wikipage above, example:
Blog
- status
- announcement
- news
- etc…

I have started going through my current inbox and am filing emails in re-purposing folders.

I’m finding that I don’t know where to file some emails…maybe we can have a wikipage for emails that we don’t know how they could be re-purposed. This is especially happening with task type emails.

If a task is to request the team to sign off on the latest server upgrade testing, then a blog post is OK.

But what if the task is just for me to carry out something on my own and report back…I guess this is where something like the Activities module of Lotus Connections is the right social tool.

In some cases a task request may be a question to me and cc:’d to two people in another team. In this case the requestee has perhaps spoken to these two people and has said I’ll email John and cc: you.
I really think that on-the-fly forums are essential, as not all work is done within a team or community. Sometimes you are cross-collaborating so you want to have a quick task and discussion space quickly set-up rather than resort to email.
Or maybe the task could be a wikipage and the comments can be used for discussion.

I’ll perhaps do a follow-up post with some examples of the type of content we could include in a “re-purposing email wiki”

Related

Wiki for gathering a list, and the need for comments and notifications
Blogs can solve cross-departmental communication silos
Email is not the centre of my universe!
Email needs to know it’s place
Enterprise email and blog processes

Request

I was sent an email today along with 5 other people.

The email read something like, “Can everyone please email me a list of issues with [our system] and then [this person] will go through all the emails make a list in a document.”

This just screamed wiki to me.

This was an In-the-Flow collaborative process that could put email to shame.

I emailed Reply-to-All with a request to use a wiki, a good idea I thought, especially since we are piloting wikis.

I got the go ahead to create a wiki…”but hurry because we need this quick.”

Right on, a wiki is hawaiian for “quick” (a private laugh with myself at the time)

I created a wiki

I listed all my issues on the wiki index page.

Then I published a wikipage for each issue.

I had to go to a meeting so I left a note on the wiki index page that I would be back at 2.30pm.

When I got back I noticed some others had made contributions.

Someone made a contribution by Reply-to-All to the initial email.
They said that my contributions to the wiki covered what they would of contributed, but they also wanted to ask a question and also add one item to the list…so they sent an email instead of contributing to the wiki
I took the essence of it and put it on the wiki on their behalf…we need to discipline people out of old habits.

At this point I’m feeling that the lack of a comments module on the wiki is making our collaboration only half successful, as whatever the object is; a document, a wiki, you need to converse about this object, and you want this inhouse next to the object.

When I was finished, I left a note at the end of the index page

“John - I have finished all my contributions”

Later on I remembered another issue, so I whacked it in.

Then I discovered another issue and added it.

I decided to look at recent changes and noticed someone left a comment within a wikipage I created
(our wiki doesn’t have comments, instead at the end of a wikipage we are creating a line and under that line we can write comments/notes)

Later on I was with a colleague and noticed they were emailing the person in charge about a wikipage, ie. they were leaving a comment.
I suggested they still put it in the wiki in our workaround comments thread, and also email the person that way you are pinging that person, and other users of the wiki can visit and notice your contributions.

Again, I’m finding comments 50% of what makes a wiki work.

What we feel we really need

Comments
-The wiki use case was creating a communal list, so scratching a linear comment thread at the end of each actual wikipage was OK, but if the wikipage was something more presentable like a communal glossary then we don’t really want comments scratchings on the actual page, we’d rather a comments module.

Notifications
-If we do scratch a comment on an actual wikipage, we want to be notified by email (or RSS)
- and what about subscribing to the page itself it see if anyone has made changes to a page (you can go to the recent changes page, but having this as a delivered notification digest would be good)

eg. Wikispaces

Notifications for whole wiki
- Edits and Discussions
- Edits Only
- Discussions Only

Notifications for a wikipage
- Page Edits
- Page Discussion

What I liked about using wikis

It was never too late to add issues.
If I emailed my contributions, I would of had to email another two times for my two extra contributions.

I also didn’t have to email that I was in a meeting and I would resume my contributions at a later time.
And again I didn’t need to email that I was finished.
The person who left a comment/note on the wikipage I created didn’t have to email me, as he wrote it in the wiki.

I also discovered issues others contributed.
Which I would have not seen if we did not use a wiki, as they would have emailed it to the person in charge.

Yeah, no crap emails!

I just visit the wiki to see the progress and conversations.

In the ideal wiki I’d also be able to be notified of new edits and comments.

No need for the person in charge to spend time compiling all the emails, deleting the duplicates, and cutting ‘n pasting a list into a document.

The wiki is used for the process and is also the finished product, you can even export to another file type.

Yeah for wikis!
Yeah for no unnecessary emails!
Yeah for collaboration!
Yeah for visibility!
Yeah for conversations!
Yeah for notifications!
Yeah for a central home!
Yeah for transparency!
Yeah for simplicity!
Yeah for a ready-made end product!
Yeah for wikis!

UPDATE: I just realised I experienced the classic CommonCraft Wikis in Plain English

When a department has a change they think will affect the organisation as a whole they will send a broadcast email to the whole office.

In a past post I mentioned to perhaps also enter the email address of a blog, so the email can also be published in a blog (post to blog via email).

This way in the future we can consult the blog to remember what’s happened in the past (even derive a bit of analysis and patterns) rather than search through our emails, plus comments enable a two way interaction (valuable insight from the social captial).

Unless the whole office is subscribed to the blog, this still needs to be a broadcast email.

But what about changes that will not affect the whole enterprise, a department has to stop and think, who is going to need to know about these changes we are making.
What they do is find the relevant email groups and send the email announcement.

But have they reached everyone who needs to know…who knows?

Another scenario is a department makes some changes where they can’t forsee it affecting others, so they just communicate the announcement within their own team.

Or maybe they announce their changes to a few people in another department, but those people fail to pass the message on within their own team.

As we can see, there is too much cognitive stress in figuring out who your audience is, there is too much relying on others to let others know.

Scenario

I was on a Document Management Support call and I couldn’t work out why something was behaving different than usual.

My last resort was to ask the IT Support team to troubleshoot the problem.

After explaining the problem, IT told me they changed something in the system and that’s why I was having these issues. It seems they couldn’t forsee how their changes to the system affected my knowledge capability of supporting users.
The problem was easily resolved as I was verbally communicated the remedy.

The problem here is that it was reactionary, I had to have an issue and demand the solution, plus it was embarrasing as they use could clearly see that our departments aren’t communicating properly.

To conclude I was not privy to knowing about this change (nothing to do with privacy, moreso not being on the emai list), and I should have been as it affected my capacity to work, and ultimately wasted company time.

This is typical departmental communication silos, and it’s happening a milion times now in every organisation as I publish this post.

Solution is visibility

The remedy is so easy…we need more visibility, rather than using email and email lists.

Visibility is exactly what I posted about the other day. It’s no a big social enterprise 2.0 effort, it just has to be visible.

In this example if the IT department published this change in a blog announcement, they don’t have to forsee which people this change will affect, as the blog is visible and public for all to see.

As mentioned before thay could still email a list, but also email the blog email address, that way, others not on the email list, can wander over to the blog homepage and see what’s new, or they could even subscribe to the blog.

By just adding the blog email address to that communication we solve the problems in the scenario described above. All it takes is putting one more email address in your email, and you don’t have to worry about lacking to communicate to all the concerned parties.
In turn we have less confusion and embarrasment, and have not wasted time and money.

Visibility is the key.

Decisions, process and actions in one department will affect another, and it’s hard to speculate all parties that will be affected, so why not make this communication public, and others can tune in.

As I mentioned in my K-flow post:

Pull = RSS subscription
Push = email broadcast

We are pushing to who we think should know; we are certain they will get the message as we are pushing it into their inbox, and we can even get a receipt they have read the email.

We are also pushing the message to publish to a blog, without having to go to the blog.

People can visit or pull (subscribe) the new content from this blog
- now people we didn’t think of who should know may be informed

Conclusion

Without any extra effort other than including the blog email address:

- we are not changing the way we work
- we feel secure in knowing we have pushed the message to who should know
- we can also feel comfort in knowing that the public (visitors and blog subscribers) will know what’s going on
- we can visit the blog to see the history of announcement (rather than searching our email)
- people can leave comments for feedback, discussion, etc…

If we had an enterprise blog culture and I was confronted with the scenario above:

A. I would already know the answer as I subscribe to the right blogs

If I didn’t subscribe, I would visit…
B. my teams blog
C. the IT Changes blog

All this without me having to even talk with anyone, and without IT having to know that I should know.

Visibility is the key to communications.

Just finished listening to an interview with Peter Evans-Greenwood from Capgemini on Des Walsh’s Social Media Show.

Peter talked about a plain and simple bottom-up innovation by workers on a Toyota production line.
When an item came down the line they had to grab various parts, but they sometimes did not grab them all or the right ones. They went to the shop and bought some coloured bins…now when an item comes down the line, they go to the corresponding bin which will have all the parts for that item. [UPDATE 15/04/08: read this in the blog post, Change Me]

To me this is a classic In-the-Flow (Directed) way to get your work done, as it’s part of your workflow.

In an earlier post I mentioned how wikis can be used In-the-Flow.

The difference between the wiki and a bin is that bin is serving one function, whereas a wiki can be used for other things.
Eg. give a knowledge worker a wiki and show them how to use it for meetings.
With this same tool they may decide we can use it for gathering ideas for a proposal…then with a wiki again they may decide to draft the report in the wiki.
Later on they may decide to use a wiki to make a best practices page, or an ideas page…this example is when it gets interesting as this use case starts having less to do with functional duties and more about volunteered Above-the-Flow stuff.
What once started as using wikis to get your tasks done is now being used to volunteer tacit know-how.

But what I get from this is like email and blogs, wikis are free-form unstructured tools, they can be used in a bottom-up way just like the Toyota example to solve a workflow problem. But even better it’s a tool that can be used again and again to solve or assist in other problems.
My point is a wiki is more than that bin solution, I won’t even say re-usuable, it’s moreso a tool that can be many solutions.

Peter also talked about getting wiki usage by integrating it with other tools, making it a part of the current lancscape, rather than only being a standalone tool…perhaps this is the similar thinking behind Wetpaint wikis as widgets.

He also mentioned deploying social tools as a way to solve issues, rather than calling it Emterprise 2.0, call it “email overload solution”, “work around solutions”, etc..for others see Mike Gotta and James Robertson.

When implementing social tools, they may be deployed with the message that conveys:

- As we all know email overload is slowing us down and causing much frustration
- We have a solution to relieve at least a quarter of your email overload
- Communal webpages (wikis), and news channels (blogs) will be used rather than email for particular types of communications
- Wikis will now be used to set up meeting agendas, and to house minutes
(you can set up a webpage and everyone can edit it, subscribe to changes, leave a comment for discussion)
- Blogs will be used for broadcast email eg. announcements, news
(publish an entry and peope who subscribe to that blog will receive that new entry)
(you can also publish a post by sending an email to the blog email address, if there are people who don’t subscribe to the blog, but you want them to read this entry, then put their addresses in the cc: field when)
(you may want to put a link to the blog home page on the end of your email-like a blog post footer-so hopefully the people in your cc: field will subscribe to your blog)

Generally, it’s:

- Blogs for news
- Wikis for meetings
- Forums for discussion

All types of managers can reject an email if it’s sent for one of these reasons above…people need to get into the habitual routine, and a little discipline helps.

It would also be mentioned all the various other ways you can use wikis and blogs, especially to get the flow of tacit know-how moving.

Other social tools would be social networks, bookmarks, podcasts, micro-blogging, etc…

More

While I was writing this post I read Abbie Lundberg’s, The business value of Twitter…it triggered some thoughts that seemed to weave into this post.

Something interesting would be internal micro-blogging like Twitter, but it could be called “watercooler” or the “listening ear”

This is to be used rather than email, blogs, wikis, and forums; if it’s brief (a couple of sentences), more immediate and conversational.

The watercooler is most commonly used to post a couple of words or sentence on a thought, idea, insight, question…

Eg. if you have an excel issue with forumla’s, post a one liner question or frustration, someone may be listening, and give you an immediate answer.

In this respect I think Twitter is more prone, easier, less commited than blogs to express tacit know-how, and to offer help which also shares tacit know-how. Actually conversation is where it’s at, and an internal Twitter marketed the right way will be the optimal example of what we want out of KM 2.0 (conversation exchange).

I expressed this in my Tumblr a little while ago:

“Twitters value contribution to the knowledge flow-spontaneous, unpolished, work in progress, thinking out loud-lends itself to this type or quality of participation due to its brief, immediate, and intimate publishing format…let’s hope internal blogs generate the same calibre of tacit value without being hindered by their format.”

The only internal uses or developments of Twitter like services I know of are IBM’s Bluetwit, and Janssen-Cilag’s Jitter.

NOTE: Capgemini have a paper called Enterprise 2.0 for the Rest of Us. You need to register, I couldn’t be bothered, but if someone else has please send it my way.

The other day I posted to the email meme that’s going around lately, I’m not going to go over the misery of email overload, but I will say that when communications are spread in the context of different tools it’s much less daunting.
This was illustrated in Matt Moore’s presentation, there are tools like IM, blogs, and micro-blogs (presence) that can be used instead of email for particular types of communications.

I’n not saying email is not a good tool, but rather for certain types of communications there are more appropriate tools that do the job much better. We can have a dashboard of complementary tools that can replace some of what we do in email, and also do lots more, especially the social and connected aspect.

So with all these other ways to communicate, which tool would you choose for what type of communication?
Is it really going to be a cognitive stress like choosing what bin to put your rubbish in (environmental sustainability stress

Luis Suarez is attacking this, as Jack Vinson puts it, input and output behavioural email issue, at the moment by using the right communcation tools for the right content, I’m just wondering how he keeps an eye on this scattered approach, and whether he misses anything…more on that later.

Here are some reasons where other tools are more appropriate than email depending on the context and calibre of your communication:

Blogs
- broadcast an announcement, instead of emailing a batch of people
- others can do the same
- comments are there for everyone to see

How is this better?
- “where’s that email saying when the server is going down, is it tonight, I hope not, I want to work back…darn, I can’t find it!”
- Instead of asking around and emailing people
- Check the server status blog
- Even leave a comment if you want to know peripheral stuff
- Hang on someone else has already left a comment on what you were going to ask, and the subsequent comment has the answer

Forums
- similar to blogs in that conversation is public rather than in email silos

How is this better?
- you are after a solution
- you can’t search people’s emails, but you can search forum conversations
- you want to ask a question
- ask the public, whereas in email you select the people you ask
- all discussion is clean and threaded, email conversations are frustrating and all over the place

IM
- a quick query
- immediacy
- a chat (even a group chat)
- just like the phone, but better if you wanted a quick query as you don’t feel obligated to keep talking as you don’t have as intimate a connection

How is this better?
- sometimes you don’t really want a history of your chat, whereas it would be just another email in your inbox
- sometimes you need an answer fast and IM is in your face, whereas people may take time to get to that email
- you wouldn’t send an email to say good morning, but you would with IM, so it feels more social and intouch
- you can chat with a group of people in real-time, email doesn’t have good group conversation features
- you can see if people are online and whether to bother them or not, email doesn’t have this intimacy

Presence
- similar to IM, but you are publishing rather than sending a message to select people
- you can send a public message at someone, but others will also see it, in email you choose the others via the cc: field
- others can tune into your micro-posts in their stream along with other people’s micro posts
- you can also send private messages

How is this better?
- you can correspond, but also have conversations, and view other conversations, it’s totally social
- the public can see your publishings, similar to blogs, whereas email is closed
- you can discover people, whereas email doesn’t have discovery
- it’s like overhearing conversations in a bar, and joining in…email is not socially dynamic at all
- you can ask a question, and lots of people you don’t even know may have an answer, with email you select the people
- since presence messages are only 140 characters long it’s a great place to break news or send links
- presence streams flow like a river and you grab onto a floating log every now and then, whereas email demands you open each item to read

Social networks
- as per presence blogging you have a profile and can communicate with friends, and discov