Understand Internet Collaboration

Internet technology is rapidly evolving, and it can be a struggle to understand the capabilities of what is out there and how it can all fit together.  This is one of several stories trying to help get my arms around some of the topics, and explain to e-friends what it is all about.

Jon Udell has a dynamite presentation explaining Groupware Collaboration and in the context of him getting into pros and cons of state of art, he includes perspectives on many different software alternatives (my numbers refer to where in his sections he is addressing something).  Here I share what I got out of his article, but I also add my own insights, as I explore some of the technologies he introduces.

• Comments, whether they are on some Discussions (see below), Peer review of some Document (see below), or on a Weblog, can be done with various different software packages that have their various pros and cons.
  • One complaint with some Weblog software, that doubtless will be fixed in future upgrades, is knowing when someone has posted a comment to one of the many places on your site where people can comment.
  • If all your comments went into Quick Topic (discussed in more detail below), you can then have a directory of all your discussion comment threads as your browser home page.  The chart shows the name of each of the threads, how many posts are in there so far, date and time of last input, (I would like by whom so as to distinquish those where my post was not the last one), and who started which discussions, then you can click on which one you want to check out.  I notice that my Quick Topics discussion directory does not include the document I commented on.
• Compatibility across Computer User Platforms (0)
  • Different participants computers can be a daunting mixture of different
  • Platforms, Operating Systems, Security Standards, Software Applications.
  • This can lead to difficulties parsing each other's material.
  • Sometimes we find garbage in the way of useful content.
• Discussions
  • Newspaper stories start with a summary of the content then expand the Who What Where When details in the body.
    • This requires training and discipline on the part of the journalist to start off every story with an abstract.
    • The world is full of humans trying to communicate, who do not have this self-discipline or training.
    • Internet discussions rarely layer the content, in a meaningful way, using the kind of example that Journalists have set for us.
  • Discussion Mailing Lists (0 2) are
    • easy to create and come with server administration tools,

    • but state of art has disadvantages.

      • For some users can be overwhelming torrent of information.
      • We want to join new lists but are overwhelmed with current input.
      • Archive search capabilities can be cumbersome.
      • Forget Security Privacy - this information is open to the Public.
  • e-mail (0 2) is
    • easy for anyone to get and use but it has lots of disadvantages for group discussions
    • Have you ever been in a discussion where there are more than two people talking about something and you get lost with who said what?
    • Have you ever joined into such a discussion when you missed the start?
    • Have you ever seen what happens to HTML e-mail when it is read by a text only e-mail then sent back as HTML so that different users are getting the content messed up by other types of e-mail software used by different participants?
  • News Groups (2.1.1) goals, advantages over mailing lists, and problems
    • spam, smut, nonsense
    • Just as web browsers can connect to many different web sites
    • news readers can connect to many different news servers
    • Jon explores how Internet technology can do a better job of delivering on the promise of News Groups
  • Quick Topic Discussion (2.1.2) offers instant discussions on a single topic
    • I first encountered this when I visited Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing Directory of Wonderful Things and commented on FBI's discovery of WarDriving.
    • You'll notice that each post on Cory's weblog comes with a Discuss link to Quick Topic.  Now my Radio comes with a default comment capability that has some advantages and disadvantages worth comparing to alternatives that are out there.
    • To use Quick Topic, we visit their site http://www.quicktopic.com/
    • we add a new topic name and supply our e-mail address
    • Quick Topic creates the internet space, e-mails us url to it
    • we then put that url where we desire on our weblog or in e-mail.
    • The material is provided in linear format, but we can do our own interlinking. 
  • Videoconferencing (0) goals and inadequacies
• Meeting Scheduling software (0) goals and inadequacies.
  • Event Coordination (1) needs to agree on agenda, participants, when and where.
  • Time Dance (1) protocol is explained, illustrated, why it works great.
• Peer review of proposed publications (0)
  • We have a document containing the work effort.
  • Multiple people wish to access it and add their comments to various sections.
  • Original author needs to absorb the suggestions and update some sections.
  • Contributing suggestion sources want to see what has changed.
  • Different people have different needs - WYSIWYG, HTML, scientific notation.
  • Typically people share their document by sending an e-mail attachment copy, then other people comment various different ways, often using word processing capabilities ahead of what the original author is able to fathom.
  • I have also seen comments heaped on comments inside a document, in which the author is now trying to change the original version of text upon which the comments are heaped.
  • Quick Topic Review works like Quick Topic Discussion, described in the Discussion part of this outline. Click Here to see an actual document review in progress.  I have not actually used this yet, but it looks to me like I could post some larger work effort of mine such as my Computer Security Myths, get the url from them and post it on my weblog and or on various discussion lists I am active in, then see what comments get posted about it.  If nothing else, it would save me the effort of e-mailing attachment copies all over creation.
• Project Teams making sense of collegue progress in a timely fashion. (0)
• We don't want to be overwhelmed with information.
• We need continually updated summaries of the changing reality.
• Quick Topic is free, uncontaminated by advertising.
• See it mentioned several places above.
• It works best in concert with other tools.
• I always worry how this model can remain true to its ideals, and stay in business, without being swallowed up by a different type of commercial interest.
• Tool Users need to learn ways to be effective with their tools.
  • When I was in College in the 1960's and seeing computer technology for the first time (computers were not in secondary schools then), it was obvious to me that the bottleneck was human typing on a keyboard, so I took a class in typing.  I never was competitive with those women who got jobs as typists, but I type a heck of a lot faster than hunt and peck people, because my eyes are on the screen or on what I am working from, not on the keyboard ... my fingers can find the right characters, except when I do a typo.

Last update: 08/25/2002; 2:27:13 AM.