Channels

I don’t like Twitter as much as forums. This is strange because they have a great deal in common: they’re actually built out of the same core components. Still, they are patently not the same, and older means of classifying channels (based on medium or media type) are increasingly difficult to apply. This prompted me to consider another way to classify collaboration channels.

Participants, content, topics: in no particular order, and often under different names, these are the core components of most collaborative channels. Twitter has tweeps who tweet, sometimes about topics tracked via hashtags. Forums have users who post in threads. The concept extends beyond discussion channels: LinkedIn has members who exchange personal data and opinions for various professional reasons; MS SharePoint (amongst other things) lets employees share documents relating to a range of different activities.

Ultimately, all of these channels enable people to organise interactions and the products of those interactions. Same conceptual ingredients, different recipes and outcomes. One possible visualisation is a tri-polar space in which one can plot the position of any collaboration tool by considering the relative importance it places on participants, content, and topics:

Obviously this only rough visualisation, but the intent is to illustrate how different channels emphasise different core components. Twitter, I would argue, is all about people and content (with a nod to topics), whereas forums are highly topic-centric ways of organising discussions (content).

On reflection, I gravitate towards topics, which explains my love of forums. Truth is I became most comfortable with Twitter when I began to regard it as a gigantic forum that had been shattered into millions of fragments (which one must then selectively collect and re-assemble). That’s not quite as outlandish as it sounds: if you use hashtag search columns in TweetDeck, you’re effectively recreating forum threads (topics) on the fly.

Besides my personal angst about Twitter vs. forums, I think this model might be useful for planning an organisation’s collaborative channels mix. For example: if you’re already developing a next generation corporate address book with Facebook-alike features such as status updates, you’ve probably covered the participants angle well enough to consider skipping a Twitter-alike channel; however, this may leave you light on topic-centric channels, making structured discussion forums a better complimentary choice.

What do you think about this way of looking at the relative emphasis of collaboration channels?

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!

Recently, we’ve been talking to a lot of people about their hopes for Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Something that may surprise heavy proponents of social media and collaboration technologies was the number of tech-savvy users who were less than enthhusiastic. Whilst these hesitators often valued the tools, they all feared an over-proliferation of channels and noise. This prompted me to ask myself: how many different ways can people can reach me, today, for a conversation?

Actually, I began by mapping my situation in 1999, looking specifically at routes to communication. These are more granular than a channel; for example: instant messaging (IM) may be a channel for communicators, but if I have accounts with 2 different IM providers and contacts on both, those are 2 different routes to conversation for me. The distinction is important because at a practical level those are 2 different services I must log into and monitor (however passively).

Some simple rules for the diagrams: I focused only on routes to conversation and ignored broadcast media, the press etc. I also allowed duplication by virtue of device (if I could get email from the same account on my work and home desktops, that counted as 2 routes). Then I colour-coded everything: blue for work-only, green for mixture of work and personal, and orange for personal-only. Here are the results for me in 1999, when I was a project manager:

NB You can view the above diagram in full-screen (this will open a new window). Zoom in / out buttons will be on the bottom-right of the new window.

Back in 1999 I had around 25 different routes to conversation. That surprised me (I had guessed at 5 or 6). Here are some ways that breaks down:

Three quick observations and recollections:

• Most innovation was happening at work and then being adopted for personal use, thus the high proportion of mixed-use routes.
• Instant messaging was in its infancy, which is reflected in the bias towards asynchronous routes such as email or faxes, which do not require participants in a conversation to be present (physically or virtually) at the same time.
• Mine was an immobile world: most routes were tethered to desktops and physical connections.

However complicated my 1999 set-up seemed then, it looks primitive (but attractively simple) when compared to the picture in 2009. In a decade my routes to conversation have almost tripled to 72. For the map below I used the same rules; the only tweak was that I included bookmarked conversations and IRC channels in which I participate at least daily:

NB You can view the above diagram in full-screen (this will open a new window). Zoom in / out buttons will be on the bottom-right of the new window.

The true number of routes to conversation is probably higher, but I excluded rarely used social networks. Either way, that’s a staggering increase. Here are some ways that breaks down:

Three more quick observations and thoughts:

• Innovation has shifted to the consumer space: the routes I have as a private citizen are often superior to those at work; my proportion of mixed-use routes may also be inflated because as a consultant I have more control over my systems than a typical corporate employee.
• Synchronous routes of all sorts have overtaken asynchronous ones, although the majority are text-based and not as intrusive as voice calls – allowing me to multi-task (there is a case to be argued that IM is actually semi-synchronous).
• The mobile-centric future which we envisaged when I worked at Vodafone a few years ago is definitely begining to take shape, although there’s still a way to go.

So is my communications world too noisy? Suprisingly, not yet. However, what these maps do not show is the relative usage of each route – that’s a really different picture. In a follow-up post I’d like to write about that, as well as how and why I haven’t (yet) fallen victim to noise, but for now I just wanted to share these illustrations and this thought:

Rewinding to my earlier definition of routes to conversation (as opposed to channels), I’d suggest that this is something communicators should acknowledge more. Talking about a channels mix made perfect sense when there was an almost one-to-one relationship between official channels and how an employee interfaced with her/his organisation, but as collaborative functionality proliferates the reality for the individual becomes more complex. And the extra twist is that many of these new routes are beyond the direct control of communicators.

More on this later, but for the moment I would really like to hear from other communicators: today, how many ways can people have a conversation with you?