I've been thinking about different collaboration tools for various groups recently and I was pondering on some of the different factors you need to consider and I came up with this (click to enlarge):
Let's take each of these in turn:
Size - One thing to consider are the numbers of people who will be collaborating. Three rough groups sizes come to mind:
- Teams (15 approx) - small number of people. Most collaboration in our world that is aimed at doing stuff (as opposed to talking about doing stuff) probably occurs in teams of 5-30 people.
- Tribes (150 approx) - departments, small businesses, communities of interest, Christopher Allen's groups, will have 60-200 active members (plus as unspecified number of blow-ins, lurkers, guests, etc). Note: There may be 300+ people registered as users but the actual number of participants will be far lower. There will probably be less collaborative work and more discussion / show 'n' tell.
- Wide-scale (150+) - Examples here might be IBM's WorldJam.
Assertion: Above 6 people, the size of a group is inversely proportional to its ability to get things done.
Timeframe - The time period over which people will be working together is also important and again I have gone for 3 rough divisions:
- Synchronous (o seconds delay) - I need to work with people now. N.B. There is probably a limit to the number of people I can work with at once without going insane. It is probably less than I think.
- Ephemeral (1 min to 1 week) - It will be over relatively quickly. Longevity & content persistence are minor issues here.
- Project (1 week to 1 year) - For collaboration with a defined start and end.
- On-going - It might be collaboration within an official group (a department) or an unofficial group (a community) but we don't know when it'll stop. Content persistence is important here.
Activities - When people collaboration, they need to do stuff. So this list is a little arbitrary. I'm sure that there's more that could go in there. But for me critical areas are:
- Discussing - Talking about stuff. Ideally in a threaded environment so it's possible to track discussions.
- Planning - Identifying tasks & their dependencies, giving those tasks timeframes & assigning people to those tasks. Project Management 101.
- Creating - Probably co-creating written content to begin with (but also mindmaps & images). Yes I'm talking wikis here.
- Sharing - Sharing documents - be they individual word/excel/ppt files or collaborative wikis/google docs. Also media files - images, audio & video.
- Commenting - marking up documents & adding tags / commentary. BTW I have been having a look at QSR's Nvivo - which allows you to tag sections of audio & video files. This is a product aimed at social science researchers (with a price tag to match) - but there are obvious applications of this in the consumer space.
Geography - I'm not going to say too much about this but basically the more dispersed by space, timezone and culture the collaboration participants are, the more you need to make explicit and the less you can rely on workarounds. Persistence & easy finding of content is critical.
Similarity - So are these people all from the same organisation (with the same culture & infrastructure)? Or do they come from many organisations? This could also be called Security. Do I want to keep our collaboration private or am I happy to have it open to the world?
These are just the things that I've been thinking of. I'm sure that you could come up with more.
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