Re: Collaboration on VMS

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 15:21 09/08/01 -0700, King Mordecai wrote:
> What i would like to see is the list move to a web
> based forum, that way all messages could be threaded
> by subject and all history could be fully searchable.
>
> Plus on the Collaboration front take a look at the
> Sharepoint team demo located here
> http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/sharepoint/howto.htm

Funnily enough, a friend and I spent about 45 minutes discussing the pros 
and cons of the various Sharepoint versions yesterday evening, so this 
suggestion is reasonably synchronicitous (if that's a real word).

AIUI: *if* you can get by without checking documents in/out, it's easy to 
access Sharepoint Services (I think) on any browser - this gives a ton of 
straightforward collaboration facilities without much pain (though I'll 
find out for sure before progressing this any further forward).

Having said that, I do believe the mailing list (as is) works quite well - 
it is open and transparent, responses are normally rapid, and people don't 
abuse the channel significantly, so we're getting a high signal-to-noise 
ratio (not to be sniffed at).

However, building (then extending, and resolving) a shared body of 
knowledge in the way that the VMS would need doesn't really fit in to most 
collaboration paradigms that I've seen: so I'm a little reluctant about 
accepting a one-size-fits-all solution just yet.

One point of my "challenges" page was to provoke discussion about both (1) 
the kind of knowledge that we (individually or as a group) think would be 
worth pursuing, and (2) how we should most usefully structure that 
knowledge, whilst remaining open to new angles/approaches.

I spent some time early last year planning a book called "Collaborate Or 
Die!" - a primer in refactoring companies, practices, relationships and 
contracts from adversarial to collaborational.

However, I decided not to proceed for the simple reason that the book was a 
good few years too early, and that too few people would "get it" to make 
the book even slightly commercial. Sad but true. :-(

But one of the lessons I learned was: collaborations need shape, focus, and 
direction to work. Here, we have a goal, but not really a direction... 
there's a big difference between the two.

Jim (Gillogly) is right in saying that our main problem isn't 
technological: but anything solution we try should be with the aim of 
helping us improve our (collective) direction, so as to let us apply the 
intellect, resourcefulness and persistence we do have more effectively. :-)

My point is: unless our shared body of knowledge has its edges brutally 
(yet usefully) exposed in some way, all it amounts to is an extremely 
large, extremely diffuse dataset, that (like many legacy software systems) 
will get progressively harder to expand as time goes by. :-(

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

PS: sorry for the long post. :-(