The politics of health care, the financial crisis, and failing US auto makers all seem to stumble around the ideology of a capitalist, free-market. This ideology is distinct from economic theory, in that a large number of us make positive value-judgements without any real evidence or analysis. For example, there’s the idea that government is inherently inept compared to private enterprise, or that free markets always drive costs down and value up.

In reality, the devil is in the details. Free markets can and often do drive productivity (cost vs. results), but only when there is competition in the market. In any market, businesses work hard to remove competition. Without any regulation, the most powerful businesses remove competition, via collusion, acquisition, or construction of barriers to enter the market. In US history, we’ve seen markets controlled, often with negative consequences for most people, resulting in anti-trust laws, and other laws intended to promote competition for the public good.

IMHO, the three big problems of the day are all linked by the failure of the government to properly regulate free markets, and this failure to act is nested in the ideology of privatization. For example, we now have the idea that some corporations are “too big to fail”. Why were they allowed to get so big? IMHO, the only reason to allow large corporate mergers in a market is to control competition, which is not in the public’s interest, and not even in investors’ interests.

GM should never have been allowed to grow so big that its failure becomes a national issue. Government regulation can split markets vertically (GM spits off Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer) and horizontally (required standards for engine interfaces ala outboard motors on boats), and it should. Sure, there’s sometimes an economy of scale that happens with large corporations,
but often, that’s counterbalanced by organizational difficulties. I doubt there’s any economy of scale for Bank of America.

The other area that ideology departs from reality is the notion that free markets are created by business, and any government regulation is interference with the natural order. That’s backwards, as the government creates the free market, via its laws, currency, police force, courts and justice system. If there’s a natural order, it’s “might makes right”, or “survival of the fittest” – nothing that anyone would accept in civilized society.

The government also grants monopolies, via patents and copyrights. Current notions of Intellectual Property have transformed these monopolies from tools for the public good, to idealogical rights issues, to the point where people assume the have a natural right to own ideas. The danger is the for the US, the ideas will be owned by large corporations with monopoly privileges constructing large barriers to entry in markets.

I’d like to see us get down to the pragmatics of a free-market economy, where we all see it as a means to an end. I think free markets are powerful tools, and one that the US has done well with over its history. Unfortunately, since Reagan/Thatcher, it’s become an ideology seen as some sort of fundamental value system, which has hurt us in the last 20 years, resulting in increased disparity and increasing instability.

At times working groups can use e-mail in a way that seems to exploit all its weaknesses. Here’s some problem areas that seem to crop up.

Tone
The tone of an e-mail can be somewhat harsh, cold, and even accusatory. Getting across the emotion in written correspondence requires some skill and effort, and often we lack the time and inclination to give tone proper care. This can lead to e-mail threads full of defensive posturing and tangential commentary. It’s best to interpret e-mail literally, and ignore tone, since it’s often misleading. If someone asks, “Have you reviewed my report yet?” don’t imagine they’re saying you’re lazy, just assume they want to know. If you’re concerned about sub-text, switch to another better suited medium to address it; in-person conversations or phone calls, if working remotely. It’s difficult to build positive, comfortable working relationships over e-mail. Keeping touch in a casual way via IM can bridge the gap.

Transience
E-Mail can be a great way to hash issues out. The problem is that an e-mail thread is a poor record of any conclusions that might have been reached, or agreements that have been arrived at. E-mail archives are hard to manage and search, and the thread can be subject to interpretation dependant on out-of-channel communications . Worse still, progress can be lost on the issues, and thrash can take hold for days or weeks, only ended via fatigue and frustration.

Wiki’s are a much better tool for hammering out issues. Discussion can happen in comments, changes can be tracked, and the resulting artifact should be well organized and searchable.

Format
For complex discussion, e-mail in practice has some difficult formatting issues, mostly around quoting and commenting within the thread. This is due to different tools and users behavior when quoting earlier messages. Some folks top-post, others bottom-post, or mix the two. Some messages are plain text, others are html, and attachments of various formats maybe used. The solution to this problem is to agree on some standards on quoting and format. If simple standards become difficult, it’s a sure sign some other medium should be used, or the discussion is too broad to make progress on.

My recommendations are:
- Minimal quoting (don’t quote unless it’s really necessary)
- Bottom-posting (comment after the quote)
- plain-text only.
- Use URLs to reference material on a web server instead of attachments where possible.

The problem with social media is that in it’s current, most popular form, it’s constructed at cross purposes to getting work done. If social networking is to support work groups engaged in productive work, it needs to have the following characteristics: Coherence Transparency, Telepresence, Authentication, and Attribution.

Facebook emphasizes growing your friend network. For most people, anyone you know is your friend, and their prestige is based on the total number of friends. This causes a lot of diffusion and noise, as the list of friends gets populated by many people you have little in common with, much less any shared goals for getting something done. Facebook also has groups and networks, but again, these things are based on growth, mainly because Facebooks’ business model depends on growing the user community, not on building groups of people who accomplish any particular goal or task. What’s needed is Coherence – formation of association around common goals or purposes.

In it’s current form, social networking is interesting because of its extensions to on-line life, making it much easier to find people and keep track of what their up to. The opportunity presented is for Transparency. This makes it fun, but a huge waste of time. Some sort of project system, where people could agree on a set of goals and end-results of an effort, and filter the noise outside of that, is were social media has to go.

It’s missing a couple of other ingredients: Authentication and Attribution. It’s hard to say who people really are on Facebook, and what their real accomplishments are. Similarly, Linked-In offers networking in a business-oriented way, and has some basic “reputation” features via its peer recommendation system, but it’s pretty hard to verify what people say they’ve accomplished.

Authentication is more than just keeping the bad guys out – it really needs to be there so that you can be sure people are who they appear to be. In real life, we have finely evolved skills for recognizing faces and voices – there needs to be an online equivalent.

Similarly, attribution must be linked to authentication so that we all know who has done what. Reputation systems are a bit different, telling you what others think about an indivitual – attribution is more about allowing you to make your own judgements. An attribution system would like like a cross-discipline version of IMDB, where you could find out what someone has worked on, and in what capacity.

Beyond attribution and authentication there are merit systems which provide a ranking or shorthand of how accomplishments compare to the group. Think of boy scout merit badges – a summarisation of various relevant accomplishments.

After struggling with lack of structure in my own work, and reading Time Management for Anarchists, it seems to me that project-based social media could serve the purpose of providing the structure that we used to rely on the corporate office for.

With authentication and attribution providing the foundation for reputation and merit systems, we could understand how we might work and contribute across multiple projects and programs, and causes.

You must review Time Management for Anarchists.

I think it’s time for me to go back to the drawing board about my productivity challenges. (Thanks, Rob!).

The document metaphor paved the way for the mass adoption of personal computing, providing a set of concepts and language that most users were already familiar with. This metaphor is so pervasive it’s really hard for us to step aside from it now, roughly 30 years later. Even on the web, where we’re being weaned off of Documents little by little is still primarily built around the transmission of documents at its core.

Early on, Documents solved the problem of user adoption and translation of work processes to computers and networks. But since then, work process and users have evolved, and the problems preserved become more and more onerous. It’s time to take of the training wheels and ride the bike.

The biggest problem with Documents is managing the copies. The web grew out of hypertext and networking as a means of solving this problem, providing URLs as a way of safely referencing remote documents, rather than having to have copies locally available. This grand vision has been partially successful in reducing the need for copies. But some copies are made to preserve various states of documents over time, resulting in version control issues that are solvable, but introduce a level of complexity that is difficult for most users to manage.

In practice, documents are created, forwarded via e-mail, editing, forwarded again, creating a sea of mostly-redundant documents riddled with small changes, some irrelevant, and some of critical importance. The e-mail trail leaves little or no meta-data to distinguish one copy or set of changes from another. Software developers have used source-code control systems to manage copies and versions with great success, but these systems are difficult for non-programmers to use.

Another problem with Documents is a multitude of formats and media types, and lack of accepted standards for them. This means that many documents are only usable for users on specific computers with specific software packages installed. Once again, the web has partially solved this problem with standard formats and rendering definitions, though it has been a constant battle to preserve a universal standard, with competing corporations intentionally departing from standards to stake out their territory. This is a particular problem with media such as sound and video.

What does the world look like without documents? For the most part, it’s already here: Wiki’s, Blogs, and search engines. Sharing information via a wiki is really the most effective solution. Search engines solve issues about cataloguing and largely eliminate the need for taxonomy.

Web applications such as wikis and blog software help with the format problem by relying on web standards, and can also streamline version and change management, as well as attribution. Information can be copied from these sites for convienence or off-line reference, but there’s not any doubt about where to find the authoritative version.

What does this mean for Microsoft Office, OOXML, Open Office and Google Docs? It’s means they’re a waste of time, a large vestigial organ of computing. The key problems going forward are Internet Standards, better connectivity, security auditing, support a diverse set of devices, and backup and archival of information on the web.

I frequent various on-line forums to follow my interests, and much of the interaction is participation in forum or discussion software. One example is Seasoned Gamers, and community founded by a group of adults that played Halo 2 on XBox Live. Seasoned Gamers has since taken on a life of its own, beyond Live, Halo, and even beyond gaming. Due to its origins via Live, member’s identities use a gamer tag, which is required to be unique across all of XBox Live.

My Live gamer tag is gregnnn, a minor variation of my real name. Most folks use gamer tags that are completely different from their real name. I’ve interacted with this group for a bit more than three years now, and I identify members by gamer tag. Both Season Gamers’ forums and Live use avatars – small-ish icons or pictures to visually identify individuals.

There are a couple of problems with the use of gamer tags and avatars as on-line identity. The biggest of these is that people change them. People change avatars from time to time, and some folks even change their gamer tags. This can dilute or destroy identity, in the same way than changing your name and your appearance periodically in real life would make it hard for your friends to keep track of you. Given the global uniqueness requirement, many gamer tags are unpronouceable and hard to distiguish. This makes it hard for me to recognize some folks, and I often find myself mixing up identities.

The other problem is that this on-line identity is separate from your real identity. Maintaining some anonymity has it’s uses, particularly if you don’t want to suffer the consequences of your on-line persona’s actions in real life. But the downside is that you’ve diluted your presence and subjected everyone to a mapping problem between your identities. I wouldn’t depend on the use of an on-line persona as means of protecting your personal privacy, or insulation from you behaviour on-line. Most people do not have the knowledge, skills and discipline to stay completely untraceable on-line.

So, I’ve come to some conclusions about on-line identity and its uses:

Pick One
Don’t dilute yourself across multiple identities. I’d go with your real name unless privacy is really important to you. Whatever you pick, use it everywhere, that is, one user name, one e-mail address. Mine is: Greg Nichols/gregnnn/greg@atomicspatula.com. If I could own nichols.com I’d buy it in a second. Note: Atomic Spatula isn’t me, it’s a place.

Make it Good
It’s fun to see people who start out with Live gamer tags come to grips with their mistake, realizing that ” xXx LeetSniper xXx” isn’t going to play well for a 30 year-old adult on a forum about gardening. If it’s not your real name, pick something that you’re comfortable with everyone using everywhere. As for avatars, I’d go with a reasonable headshot. I like Seth Godin’s recommendations on this, though I’d say there’s a lot more at stake than your “personal brand”. Us humans have invested millions of years of evolution into facial recognition. It would be silly not to use it. I use my real name where possible, and I really need a better head-shot avatar that I’ve got right now.

Don’t Change It.
Changing names or avatars is something you should do very rarely. It’s akin to plastic surgery or name changes in real life, and not something you’d do on a whim.

Finally, I’d consider what the goals are in maintaining an on-line identity. You’d like it to be the foundation of personal recognition that you build a reputation on, whether it’s for professional purposes or purely social interactions.

There’s something that bugs me about the idea of collaboration software: It’s the implication that it’s a new idea, and problem ignored by computing and software, that requires new applications and approaches. This is a silly idea. The Internet was constructed to promote collaboration. Computer networks, client-server computing, database systems, and other areas have always been about promoting collaboration. It’s hard to think of an area of software that is aimed at individuals to the exclusion of the working group.

The idea that Collaboration is a market vertical is more than wrong, it’s counter-productive. It ignores the history of computing, particularly how work and the workplace, and social practice has made use of computing and communications technology. That’s the important part, because while technology changes rapidly, the habits and practices of humans change much more slowly. As workers in an increasingly distributed and electronically connected workplace, we need to observe how the workplace is changing in the face of technology as an evolution, not as some revolution brought about by the installation of a new software package.

For example, the workhorses of collaboration within the software industry are some of the oldest tools: e-mail and source code control systems. It would be silly to ignore these tools in any new project, be it developing processes within a project, or developing tools to support it. Microsoft’s tools illustrate this problem pretty well. While their IDE’s are very powerful and productive for individual developers, group use of these tools are hampered by an extremely weak source code control system: Source Safe, and lack of e-mail integration. (Disclaimer: My last experience with the Microsoft development platform was in 2005 – perhaps they’ve improved since).

When I write about Virtual Work Groups, I want to make it clear that I do not see this as a problem solvable with some nifty software packages. It’s fundamentally a human process problem, with a mature tool set readily available for application. Folks interested in improving the tools should look for better integration, hopefully via open standards. The last thing we need is more walled gardens inventing new, unproven and untested ways of working.

One of the biggest challenges I face in my work is its lack of structure. I work from my home office on most days, connected to my work and co-workers via e-mail, IRC, bug tracking systems and other web applications. I have the infinite distractions of the Internet facing me from my three computer screens. Given the pragmatics of a two-career household and parenting, my work day is split into two or three pieces spanning all waking hours.

I wish that I could write about how I’ve beat this problem, and tell amazing stories about how productive I am. Instead, I’ll tell you about what hasn’t worked, and what seems promising.

To Do Lists

Making lists of things to accomplish, first thing in the morning seemed like a promising idea. I tried setting some goals for the day, striking a balance between the important and the immediate. But in practice, I find these lists too depressing to look at. Most items are there because I’ve been putting them off, and reminding me of them at the start of the day seemed to motivate finding distractions so that I didn’t have to think about them. The only success here was that it did help me get really important things done, such as daily exercise goals (top priority in any day), and some burning issues where I’d missed deadlines, or had them bearing down one me. But for the most part, To Do lists were slightly better than nothing.

Daily Schedule

After a day consisting mostly of meetings, I realised that I had been very productive. It’s sad, in a way, that a day of meetings seemed more productive than my average day. Perhaps that illustrates just how bad my problem is. But, it got me thinking: maybe I should attack the lack of structure directly by imposing a somewhat artificial structure on the day. So, I tried firing up my Google calendar, and scheduling events for myself to plan my day. I set aside a specific hour to two hours of the day for a specific task or project. I would schedule most of my day, and leave some time for breaks.

This has worked pretty well, for the most part. Even though it amounts to scheduling meetings with myself all day, I get more done with this structure than approaching each day ad-hoc, subject to any distraction that might occur. I’d like to set up a bit more of a pattern for what happens each day. For example, doing tasks in the morning that require more creative effort, and saving the “turn the crank” tasks for the afternoon. It would probably make sense to expose the daily plan to my co-workers to give them an idea of my plans as well.

I’ve got a long way to go. It’s 11:10 PM, and even without my calender I can tell it’s time for bed

As I write, I sit in my office, alone. There’s no one to see, no conversations to overhear, just the view out the window into my suburban neighbourhood. There’s no one out there either. It’s pretty clear that any group effort or collaboration isn’t happening. Worse still, I’m not sure if it should, or what important work needs to be done today, or how any events small or large might effect things. I am isolated, lost, unaware, and unmotivated.

Without communications technology, I’d stay this way for a long time. Fortunately, I have e-mail, IM, a cellphone, and other bits of technology to link me to the outside world. The quality and immediacy of these links are critical for productive collaboration in a remote setting.

There are delicate balances to maintain here as well. Stopping to read every e-mail message the moment it arrives is not generally a productive work habit, as the interruptions make work requiring coherent thought difficult or impossible. I also need to preserve some level of personal privacy that is at odds with revealing everything about my personal situation, moment to moment, as might happen with a live webcam. Finally, the technology needs to fit my work habits as much as is practical. Video conferencing systems work well enough, but if I have to schedule a meeting in a conference room to use them, then they’re irrelevant, since I have to stop work to use them. These telepresence systems fail because they are not integrated into the regular work process, and are nearly as intrusive as getting on a plane.

The links to moment-to-moment activities within the working group need to be more subtle and well integrated. In my current projects, the best technology is some of the oldest on the internet. I use a combination of instant messaging (IRC), source code control (CVS/SVN) and bugtracking (Bugzilla) with e-mail notifications. With these tools, I have some crude understanding of who in my work group is active, and what they’re working on, mostly in an immediate fashion. We could be doing a lot better with existing tools.

We have a live chat room of sorts that takes the form of an IRC channel. Through it, conversations can be had, or passively monitored about current goings on in the project. This IRC channel replaces the role of the common area in a physical office were people can congregate and talk within earshot of all group members. Questions can be asked and answered, with anyone jumping in at any time to participate. One-to-one conversations can be easily spawned off if the topic isn’t relevant to the group.

Micro-blogging networks such as Twitter and Facebook can also provide a similar level of immediacy, though the use of these example is primarly personal and leisure-focused, with often questionable relevance to a working group. That said, there is a huge value to providing this sort of feedback to the group, particularly as our personal and professional interactions are often not distinct. It is said that much business transpires on the golf course.

Virtual Work Groups need to constantly strive for more immediate feedback to compensate for the lack of physical contact. I’d suggest these groups err on the side of too much information and interruption, as the maintenance of personal relationships is critical to facilitation and motivation of the group.

Prior to the use of information technology and communications networks, groups that wanted to work together needed to work physically together in the same location. This fact held even when I started my career.

When I worked in the defence industry in the late 80’s all work happened either in-person or over the phone. When we got some PCs, we put them all in a lab, and used them to print status reports that we would pass around. Most of my working day involved hand-written documents and drawings that I would either hand-carry, or intraoffice mail them around in those manilla envelopes with holes in them.

When I went to graduate school, we used e-mail and e-mail lists. I attended research groups in person, and most significant work, such as my thesis, were reviewed and marked-up in paper form. Still, a significant amount of less-formal work happened over e-mail. My research group was spread across the campus, so e-mail was quicker than walking.

At the same time, largely as a diversion, I would spend part of my day on Usenet newsgroups, mainly following my musical interests. Usenet groups were some of the first virtual communities. While much of the interaction was personal leisure time for me, many participants at that time crossed the boundary into professional work, using these groups as resources for collaboration.

By the late 90’s, dynamic web techology allowed virtual communities to move to the web with support for more forms of content. While many of these communities had more of a culture and leisure focus, and were seen as a marketing tool, increasingly these communities became resources for professionals. I worked in and internet start-up that hoped to build support for virtual communities as a marketing/distribution vehicle. We explored self-organizing communities driven by common interest, called mybytes.com similar to Yahoo groups. We aquired a company that had developed a social networking site, called Six Degrees, very similar to Linked-in and Facebook in its their current form,

Use of these resources within the enterprise was less prevelant, largely over proprietary and confidentiality concerns. Enterprise collaboration and workgroup software grew to fill this walled garden within corporations, which increasingly needed support for remote work to support national and global efforts. VPNs extended the garden worldwide while insulating the enterprise from the internet at large.

This tension between the intranet and internet was more than a technical and business problem, it was highlighted cultural issues around proprietary corporate culture. Due to other forces as well as the rise of the internet, workers have become less tied to corporations, and more tied to interest based, or professional communities not limited to corporate or geographical boundaries.

As things now stand, the physical corporate office has little to offer workers who are now closer tied to virtual communities than any particular corporate sponsor. Here in the United States, globalization has put pressure on workers to behave more as free lance professionals, as large and small corporations increasingly outsourced and move work to remote locations.

This has made the management of remote work a primary concern for both corporations and free-lancers.