Archive for December, 2009

Audio is often underrepresented in conversations about collaboration. Perhaps that’s because podcasting is no longer new and telephony is old (and Skype has recreated all of its features for low or no cost). Text is more portable and video is sexier. But one community, online gamers, has continued to evolve audio communication in some interesting ways.

Modern gamers have to be good collaborators: most games now include or consist solely of online play. But early in-game communication was mostly via text chat. Being under fire and communicating with the soldier next to you by typing instead of shouting was clunky. Typing got you killed. Gamers quickly realised that some form of conference call was required: but one that worked without a ‘phone and cost nothing, because nobody had a conference ‘phone at home and the soldier next to you lived in Brazil.

Enter products such as TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. Like Skype (which both preceded), these enable players to talk with each other for free over the Internet; but like chatrooms the focus is on persistence and multiple participants: a single channel might contain 100 players.

So far, so much like a gigantic conference call; but as games became more complex this medium evolved too. In massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or EVE Online, players can belong to groups numbering 100 or more. Operating like small corporations, such groups frequently employ dozens of different audio channels, each reflecting a sub-group of players focused on a particular activity or mission.

Unlike conference calls, these channels are unscheduled and persistent; players move between them with a single click. Perhaps more importantly, etiquette also makes it permissible to eavesdrop and flick between conversations as befits one’s interest or current activity. In many circles it’s considered perfectly acceptable to enter a channel and, at a suitable break in the conversation, ask a question on the off chance that someone listening might know the answer. For those of you who use Twitter, this model of crowdsourcing / friendsourcing answers should be very familiar.

Despite this revolution in communication, gamers still spend a lot of time being dead. So having a channel for the dead is also commonplace. Being able to simply chat with fellow players is a vital part of building a community, in exactly the same way that golfers congregate in the clubhouse bar between rounds. So when not actively playing it’s normal for gamers to lurk in a channel as they might in a chatroom, half-listening to the conversation and participating occasionally. Crucially, the ability of these applications to share your earphones with iTunes makes it a background feature, like the chatter in a real office.

In an era of increasingly dispersed teams I think communicators and collaboration specialists might just find this approach interesting.

Consider a team split across multiple locations. A common audio channel in which everyone lurks provides the digital equivalent of talking with colleagues over the desk partitions. For impromptu break out conversations individuals simply move into an empty channel for as long as required (without sending meeting requests and booking dial-in numbers). Leaders and co-ordinators might also find use for special paging features, which allow them to broadcast urgent announcements across all channels. Like evolving a forum, it’s relatively easy to tailor these tools to reflect a team’s structure and working practices.

Personally, I suspect it’s the listening component of this set-up that has most value. When one’s colleagues are physically distant, being able to listen to their background chatter can inform and connect in ways that formal update meetings (or even daily blogs) might not.

Update (15 DEC 2009): Apologies to the open-source community, I should have mentioned Mumble in my original edit. Mumble is worth checking out, especially as it comes packaged with its server software (Murmur) – perfect if you want to do some free testing with friends or colleagues.

Email bites back

For a while now I’ve been of the view that a long term goal of any organisation is to reduce massively the volume of email it generates. My reasons are various and range from breeding a culture of communication dependency to swamping employees with unmanageable volumes of information to locking organisational knowledge in inaccessible places. Coincidentally, today’s Times carries a great article about this very subject and suggests that the heyday of email may well be passing.

But sifting through employee comments made in a recent communication survey, email was most certainly biting back. The client in question has put significant effort into developing and encouraging the use of various collaborative tools and whilst those are gaining traction, it has created a more complex environment that presents employees with a potentially bewildering array of communication choices. Consequently, a quiet but discernible voice requesting that the Inbox once again become the communication portal supreme was clearly audible.

It’s been a while since I heard anyone suggest that more email might lead to better communication so I’ve given some thought to how I (and my client) might respond and arrived at three thoughts.

• Change takes time. It’s a fact of life that people adopt at different rates, whatever the change. This means we have to handle any shift away from email in the same way we would any other; by managing the change curve, finding and exploiting early adopters and above all making the change meaningful and of benefit to people.
• Clarify channel roles. My colleague Alan Richardson is writing a series of posts about the roles for different channels so I’ll leave that to him. But what’s obvious to me is that we have to be very clear about the role of any new channel we introduce and ensure people engage with it. We also need to be ruthless about switching off channels we no longer require or whose purpose has changed.
• Transform the role of the Inbox. I think it highly unlikely that today’s workforce will abandon the Inbox as the portal supreme although their offspring might. So instead of looking at alternatives to it, what about seeking to change its role from repository (where my information is stored) to navigator (the compass which directs me to the information and interaction I want).

It’s not an exhaustive list and I’d love to extend it further. So let me know what you think and indeed, whether you agree!