Remember FreePint, the newsletter that beams out of the UK to 100K information workers (that would be all of us, yes?), where I wrote a little piece on my favorite blogs and websites? Another request arrived from them. They're celebrating their 10th anniversary (congrats in advance) and, for that, editor Monique Cuvelier has asked for "the most significant developments over the last 10 years" in collaboration. In 500 words. What would you cite?
This week's edition has a good round-up on social networking sites by Shally Steckerl.
Hmm. So many possibilities. One thing I learned a long time ago deploying Lotus Notes is this: People who don't want to collaborate, or have no incentive to, won't, no matter what technology you have. This simply proves once again that technology is about how people use it, not the thing itself.
Therefore, I think I'll have to go meta with this.
To me the greatest change in collaboration has been that we are open to threading ourselves together, and that those ways have birthed wider, albeit potentially shallower, pathways to sharing ideas. We are technically, and increasingly metaphorically, networked - instant communication, digital cell phones with email, audio and video sharing, wikis, blogs, 2nd Life (still a fascinating, if empty, experiment) and so on.
It's that we're not afraid to network now. This is a new way of managing relationships, and we're figuring it out. So I'd say the most important development has been that so many of us find networked relations second nature now.
If we can conquer the problem of shallowness - that emotions and conversational intent are often muzzied, or inferred incorrectly - we'll all be less afraid.
Posted by: Rob Oakley | Tuesday, 25 September 2007 at 12:40 PM
Beautifully said, Rob. Thanks yet again.
Posted by: | Tuesday, 25 September 2007 at 01:29 PM