The dos and donts of collaborative space methodology

At http://www.shared-spaces.com/blog/2005/11/why_closed_does.html Micheal Sampson makes some important observations on the values of workspaces. Not that I agree with what he says, at least not entirely. But what he says has a lot of merit and deserves some digestions, and if I may, this response.

His primary assertion is that collaborative workspaces don't work, primarily because they are behind closed doors. His second assertion is that people fallback on Email because of this closed nature. There is no doubt that in many cases collaborative workspaces don't work, and there is equally no doubt that in many other instances they do. The question I would like to ask is why the successes, and the failures.

Before addressing that the fallback to Email is an interesting if not annoying phenomenon. Now let me ask you, dear reader, a question. Hypothetically had the entire world been brought up on collaborative workspaces and Email was the new challenger, would they ever adopt Email? Would Email gain traction in such a climate.

Email suffers badly, very badly from spam, unreliability, security (lack thereof) and a host of other ills. That aside its two undoubted strengths are openness and ubiquity. The fact is that Email is universal. And spammers know how to exploit its openness to their full value. But we all exploit its openness. An email address is a unversally understood concept. A standard.

And so take a look at target markets for collaborative solutions, which are joining the dots on disparate projects, across disparate peoples. In the jargon - working at the "edge", perhaps across company boundaries, across nations, across prejudices.

When working at the edge only full value can be gained if all "project" members can collaborate together. I put project in quotation marks intentionally, because how do you define a project team? In collaborative environments the project team is a very fluid dynamic that can change daily.

With the openness of Email there are few boundaries and so adding new project team members and removing old ones becomes kind-of easy. Kind of.

The primary problem of Email is that there is no concept of a project repository. if you add a new team member to the debate it is almost impossible, and that is worth repeating, almost impossible for you to bring them up to speed without significant human effort. So they join the project in spirit, but not in flesh.

The strength of collaborative workspaces is that they have the repository. Therefore if a new team member joins they get full access to everything, and the instant ability to know and quiz any team member. So they get all the knowledge, and any stress of bringing them up to speed is a shared effort.

Now Micheal asserts that collaborative workspaces are closed, and that this is a weakness. That is a big subject. Let me just say that I belong to some closed private workspaces and they succeed primarily because of their closed nature. The kind of important debates therein simply could not be conceived of in a more ope vehicle. Such spaces do not advertise themselves. Therefore their success is not largely known. But that does not mean they do not exist.

There is a good reason to make some spaces more public, more accessible. And we at PopG do that for the Groove Virtual Office community by explicitly promoting and publicising "public" space, providing public invitations to them and finally providing reliable space delivery mechanisms. It does surprise me that a directory of publicly available spaces is not inherent in the product. But given the larger need for private spaces, at varying levels of privacy (including those with just one member!) I can see why this function is not a top priority.

So Michael, simply because you have not belonged to many successful spaces does not mean that they do not exist, have value, indeed have very significant value. At the top, imho, of the value chain are peace efforts in war torn areas of our unstable world. Groove and other technologies have been used with great effect as a technology aid to help broker peace, where all else seemed doomed to failure.

One final point - on why some spaces fail. It appalls and saddens me when someone tries to put all their eggs in one basket. They abuse the repository and treat it as a general dumping ground. In such cases failure seems part of their desitiny. This is not a fault of the technology - the fault lies in training and support - and misunderstanding.