The ideal form-factors for computing and mobile devices come down to the environment they’re used in. If you’re sitting at the same desk in an office most days, a desktop is the way to go. If you sit at multiple desks or coffee-shop tables, a notebook is the thing. If you don’t sit, but either walk around or lay on the couch, you need a tablet.

There’s a gap in the available platforms between notebooks and smart phones, where a notebook is cumbersome, and most mobile devices are too small. Netbooks are edging into this gap, but a multi-touch tablet would be a better fit.

The applications you’re likely correlate to the environment. If you’re a graphic designer, you probably need to work at a desk with a full-blown application. If you’re sketching some ideas, you might relax somewhere with a tablet.

I view the iPhone OS/UI as a happy accident. Given the small screen real estate, the iPhone OS has to have a simplified and sharply-focussed UI. This clean UI makes the Touch a pleasure to use. Not only does it offer direct manipulation though multi-touch, but it’s sheer simplicity makes it very transparent.

Compare the experience of the iPhone’s YouTube application to the experience of YouTube in a web browser. On the web, YouTube is cluttered with all manner of suggestions and up-sell. On the iPhone, it’s wonderfully simple. The differences between Mail on OSX vs. Mail on the iPhone are similar.

The iPod Touch is most of the way there. It just needs to be bigger, making it more useful for reading and viewing media. More real-estate would also allow some real work product. The iPhone/Touch are really about consuming content. A bigger device would open the possibility of its use in creative and productive output.

I’ve laid-out the two product design issues that make the “bigger iPhone” the right approach for Apple: finding the usage gap between the iPhone and the notebook, and the general superiority of the iPhone OS for that usage.

Beyond those product issues, the failure of Windows tablets to crawl out of their niche (doctors’ offices) shows that putting a personal computer OS in a tablet package isn’t going to sell in any significant proportion to notebooks.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve decided to start a project writing about on-line collaborative work groups. The best label for this I can think of at the moment is Virtual Work Groups. I’ve put together an outline that structures what I want to write about, and I will use this blog to explore some specific topics around this theme.

Here’s an Abstract:

Social Networks and Virtual Communities provide the foundations of Virtual Working Groups: on-line networks of people working in remote locations, collaborating on projects. These groups provide the support traditionally provided by physical corporate offices, structuring work in a social context based on interpersonal relationships and common goals among interdisciplinary groups.

The pragmatics of the modern virtual working group in its efforts to produce valuable products and work output in a traditional sense, such as products and services. The goal of this effort is to define pragmatics for an effective and productive on-line collaboration with concrete, measurable output.

Stay tuned.