I've read a couple of things lately (don't have the references right to hand--sorry, but I'll get them up here eventually) that people don't use shared workspaces even when they're available. I'm planning to write something longer about shared workspaces and why they don't get used like we think they should or wish they would, but here are some interesting thoughts from a presentation by Sam Ruby at ETCON about working on the !Echo Wiki and mailing list and other discussion areas:
If you have a coherently aligned and focused community, a wiki can be a very powerful thing, allowing collaboration to proceed at an astounding pace.If you have a community in imperfect alignment, a wiki will accurately reflect this state. Given a group with a genuine desire to align, a wiki can provide a powerful and positive feedback loop.
But what happens when you have an unbounded community with divergent goals?
In particular, he talks about issues with mailing lists, wikis and weblogs. Each have strengths and weaknesses (and everything he mentions isn't listed here--these are just things I thought were particularly interesting):
Mailing lists seem very prone to flamebait: statements which may very much be true but are expressed in a provocative way. Some people seem to just have an inborn ability to attract flames.What's worse, is that most flamebaiters don't seem to realize what they are doing.
On a wiki, emotionally charged words tend to be quickly replaced with ones that more effectively make the point that is trying to be made without the distracting histrionics.
Mailing lists can discuss a topic without coming to a firm conclusion. Even when a conclusion is reached, it seemingly can be reopened at any time. This can be frustrating.
On a wiki, time is collapsed. By necessity, contributions have to focus on some new point of view that has not been previously expressed.
Weblogs have much of the same benefits as mailing lists, with a few additions:* Weblog authors act as filters/valves. Updates can be as seldom as a few times a week versus literally hundreds per day.
* Posts contain a dramatic increase in contextual information in the form of personal relevance and hypertext links
* It is much easier to route around flamebaiters
In the end, he suggests a mix of strategies and also notes that much of the issue (as in meatspace) is getting contributors to contribute in ways that help the process and lead to a conclusion.
Posted by dcoates at February 17, 2004 04:39 PM