August 2009

Google is on a fishing expedition to see if we're willing to take web-surfing to a whole new level. My colleague Steve Backman introduced us to Google Wave a few months ago. I attended a developer's preview at Techsoup Headquarters last week, and I have some additional thoughts to share.

Google's introduction of Wave is nothing if not ambitious. As opposed to saying "We have a new web mashup tool" or "We've taken multimedia email to a new level", they're pitching Wave as nothing less than the successor to email. My question, after seeing the demo, is "Is that an outrageous claim, or a way too modest one?".

The early version of Google Wave I saw looked a lot like Gmail, with a folder list on the left and "wave" list next to it. Unlike Gmail, a third pane to the right included an area where you can compose waves, so Wave is three-columner to Gmail's two.

A wave is a collaborative document that can be updated by numerous people in real-time. This means that, if we're both working in the same wave, you can see what I'm typing, letter by letter, as I can see what you add. This makes Twitter seem like the new snail mail. It's a pretty powerful step for collaborative technology. But it's also quite a cultural change for those of us who appreciate computer-based communications for the incorporated spell-check and the ability to edit and finalize drafted messages before we send them.

Waves can include text, photos, film clips, forms, and any active content that could go into a Google Gadget. If you check out iGoogle, Google's personal portal page, you can see the wide assortment of gadgets that are available and imagine how you would use them -- or things like them -- in a collaborative document. News feeds, polls, games, utilities, and the list goes on.

You share waves with any other wave users that you choose to share with. User-level security is being written into the platform, so that you can share waves as read-only or only share certain content in waves with particular people.

Given these two tidbits, it occurred to me that each wave was far more like a little Extranet than an email message. This is why I think Google's being kind of coy when they call it an email killer - it's a Sharepoint killer. It's possibly a Drupal (or fill in your favorite CMS here) killer. It's certainly an evolution of Google Apps, with pretty much all of that functionality rolled into a model that, instead of saying "I have a document, spreadsheet or website to share" says "I want to share, and, once we're sharing, we can share websites, spreadsheets, documents and whatever". Put another way, Google Apps is an information management tool with some collaborative and communication features. Google Wave is a communications platform with a rich set of information management tools. It's Google Docs inverted.

So, Google Wave has the potential to be very disruptive technology, as long as people:

• Adopt it;


• Feel comfortable with it; and


• Trust Google.

Next week, I'll spend a little time on the gotcha's - please add your thoughts and concerns in the comments.

We use a lot of research methods at Idealware. We do a tons of interviews and a fair amount of surveys, but the occasional focus group can also be useful. A focus group is essentially a big group interview - a discussion with 5-10 people and a facilitator. They have to be used with care - focus groups offer suffer from a "group think" mentality where it seems like everyone has strong feelings about something, when actually just one or two people do and everyone else agrees to seem agreeable.

But they can be useful to quickly get people's opinions on complex subjects (like, say, a department's needs for a new system) - the discussion can help highlight some of the nuances involved . And, from a practical perspective, it's much less time consuming to conduct a focus group with seven people than to interview seven people individually and then to analyze that data. There's not a lot of cases where I'd prefer the focus group to the seven interviews in the ideal world... but on limited budgets, a focus group is way better than no research at all.

So how do you make the most of a focus group? Organizations rarely have the luxury of a professional facilitator, or even one that's not directly involved in the project at hand. With that in mind, here's some tips for team members to successfully facilitate.

• Default to over-clarification. It’s important to think of yourself as an apprentice, there to learn everything the people there know on these topics. Actively keep yourself from assuming that you know what people are trying to say, but instead ask them to clarify, or at least paraphrase it back for them (“So it’s difficult for you to make sure you’re not sending two letters?”). This is difficult to do in practice, and takes effort. Most of us have the urge to just accept statements and assume we know what they mean, to ensure we don’t look stupid or slow to understand.
• Keep yourself out of the conversation. Try hard to keep your opinion and plans out of the discussion. If you’re asked questions (for instance, what your plans are to address a problem), say that you really want to hear everyone’s opinions first, and you’ll take on questions at the end.
• Don’t agree with people. Stay away from actually agreeing with people’s statements (“I know what you mean.” “Yes, we’ve found that too.” “That’s something we’re working on.”). That kind of reinforcement biases your data by introducing your own opinion. Instead, try to limit your responses to acknowledgment (“Thanks for mentioning/ sharing/ saying that!”), leading (“Do others have thoughts?”) or clarifying (“Can you say more?”)
• But be agreeable! Be pleasant. Try to keep your body language friendly – open, arms uncrossed, leaning forward.
• Try to use a light touch in moderation. Your job is to keep the conversation mostly on track, to make sure everyone participates, and to cover the guide. Often, conversation flows pretty well once you get started, so don’t feel you need to steer it constantly. Remember that whenever you prompt people (“what about fundraising? Have you had issues with wikis?”) you are directing the conversation, and making it difficult to know whether they would have mentioned that topic without prompting. So prompting should be done sparingly.
• Be the hero when needed. Remember that if one person’s dominating, or a small group is taking the conversation off topic, the rest of the group is likely to be relieved if you bring it back to a more balanced, productive conversation. You can be their hero!
• Make it a jargon-free zone. Strive to keep the conversation free of jargon that not everyone in the group would be familiar with – try to use accessible language yourself, and try to translate for others if other participants use technical language (“Thanks – that sounds like a big issue for you. Just to confirm, when you say CMS, you mean a content management system?”)
• Remember that you’re there to facilitate. Keep in mind that it’s more important to keep the conversation useful and on track that it is to process the implications of what you’re hearing. You can do that later from the notes. In fact, as alarming as it sounds, you don’t actually need to listen to what people say more than is necessary to guide the flow around their key issues, and to keep it productive and friendly. It’s common as a facilitator to listen with only half an ear to the end of a discussion while planning out how you’re going to transition to the next thing.
• But don’t let these guidelines freak you out. It’s more important that you’re comfortable and natural than that you follow these guidelines to the letter. Don’t stress about these guidelines to the extent that you become awkward or robotic.

I’m trying out Open Atrium. http://openatrium.com/ Now in first beta, Open Atrium from Development Seed consolidates powerful project management features to Drupal in a modern, polished format.

When we first started bearing down on Drupal two years ago, about the first thing we wanted to do manage independent projects on our own www.dbdes.com site. We got reasonably far, with the ability to define clients, projects, tasks and organize blog-like discussion and documents for each. Given the state of the art two years ago in Drupal and our own priorities, we eventually shelved it in favor of a generally positive relationship with Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com). Meanwhile, many of our Drupal sites required one or another set of Intranet features, and each one got delivered in customized, one-off ways.

Fast forward to summer 2009, and the Open Atrium project led by the wonderful Development Seed team (http://developmentseed.org/) promises to provide a standard Intranet within a Drupal site. I suspect along the way, it will give Basecamp and its competitors a run for its money. Well, given that Open Atrium is open source, “run for the money” may not be the best way to express the comparison; more about that later.

So what is Open Atrium and what does it have?

• Install Open Atrium as easily as Drupal 6 generally, and then get going with it in about 5 minutes. Open Atrium has all the polish now available in Drupal 6-on-the-verge-of-Drupal 7.
• Create a group and start adding users to them. If you know Basecamp, a group might correspond to a “project.” As with a Basecamp project, you can have people from more than one company on a project. Drupal fans: Open Atrium groups rely on Drupal’s “Organic Groups” module and start with all that OG power.
• From the group dashboard, you see a snapshot of all the recent activity for the group, and each user can customize elements of his/her dashboard.
• Each group has its own group blog for discussion with comments and related documents. Anyone who uses project management software these days would probably agree that the blog format works better in a more modern way than older-style web forums or bulletin boards. And it uses the increasing popular "markdown" technique for formatting text. You can assign users with the group to take part in a discussion, with notifications going to the user by email. In the full production release, Open Atrium will also have other familiar forms of messaging.
• Each group has its own calendar of events, which aims to exchange in and out with your other calendars. Use the calendar to mark out deadlines and major project events.
  
• Document library, in any upload format, including the ability to compare revisions of documents.
• Each group also can have a “shoutbox,” which resembles a private group twitter space. What is a private twitter? We have experimented with Yammer (http://www.yammer.com), which you should check out if you want a cool, free, private twitter for your team. Having a group shoutbox offers the same and part of the whole Open Atrium for that group. This has great potential in itself when it reaches the full release stage.
• Case Tracker. In the case tracker, you create projects for your group, which I would say roughly correspond to Basecamp milestones, and then you add cases to them. Cases correspond to to-dos or tasks. The case feature already has the advantage of assigning multiple people to them, having start and end dates associated with each case, setting priority, notification and so on. Basecamp alternatives has features like this, and it’s great to see them in Open Atrium. And each case has full blog like discussion and the ability to attach documents.

This is a very cool start. And I expect Open Atrium to really take off. Within the Drupal community, adding Intranet and collaborative features like these has been part of the big appeal. Open Atrium offers the prospect of being able to do it in a standard way.

Open Atrium comes as an independent Drupal install—a Drupal distribution. It is not something to evaluate as an add-on set of modules to your existing Drupal site. You can download the installer package at http://openatrium.com/download, available already in about twenty languages. (If you are interested, Lullabot has a great discussion of Drupal distributions and why Open Atrium comes that way). Once you install it, you can continue to customize it as with Drupal generally.

Having a complete open source project management alternative is part of the larger discussion about cloud computing and hosted software. We like delegating to 47 Signals (the Basecamp publisher) all the administration of the site for all our concurrent projects. And yes, I do trust having client data secure on Basecamp. Wow, one big thing not to have to worry about!

The Basecamp API allows manipulating of any and all data they store for me. And even without that, I can regularly download all project activity in one XML file. Please note: Not project documents, but everything else. With the help of the wonderful ThickToast add-on from http://www.vb123.com/basecamp/, I can regularly bring Basecamp activity into our internal Access-based billing system.

Yet overall, like our use of any Software-As-A-Service provider, disengaging from Basecamp would be a complicated process. Like moving out of a place you have lived in for a while, lot of stuff to take care of and fit to where you are going. And it does mean counting on some start-up company’s commitment to privacy and security.

Open Atrium allows you to host your stuff wherever you want. All your data is there in accessible MySQL tables, following Drupal standard node format. Like everything else with Drupal, you will have the choice of your own private server; hosting it on any of tons of reliable Internet Service Provider; or -- I suspect -- provided in fully managed SAAS format by Acquia or someone. For Drupal developers, taking part with Development Seed in the development project is a lot more friendly than making suggestions, say, to the Basecamp folks.

What provides more overall peace of mind I will leave as (an interesting) topic for another day.

For sure, Open Atrium is Open Source, downloadable without licensing fees. And those who involved, which I suspect we will, will have a lot of say in how the project evolves. In the first week of release of the beta version of the software, over 10,000 people downloaded it—outstanding for a brand new Open Source project. And the project has close to 2000 twitter followers.

Check it out; I know we will. I am already thinking about which upcoming project to manage from it.

I'm following up on my post suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web. Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document.

There are a lot of use cases for Wikis:

• We can all thank Wikipedia for bringing the excellent crowd-sourced knowledgebase functionality to broad attention. Closer to home we can see great use of this at the We Are Media Wiki, where NTEN and friends share best practices around social media and nonprofits.



• Collaborative authoring is another natural use, illustrated beautifully by the Floss Manuals project.



• Project Management and Development are regularly handled by Wikis, such as the Fedora Project



• Wikis make great directories for other media, such as Project Gutenburg's catalogue of free E-Books.



• A growing trend is use of a Wiki as a company Intranet.

Almost any popular Wiki software will support the basic functionality of providing user-editable web pages with some formatting capability and a method (such as "CamelCase") to signify text that should be a link. But Wikis have been exploding with additional functionality that ramps up their suitability for all sorts of tasks:

• The Floss Manuals team wrote extensions for the Open Source TWiki platform that track who is working on which section of a book and send out updates.



• TWiki, along with Confluence, SocialText and other platforms, include (either natively or via an optional plugin) tabular data -- spreadsheet like pages for tracking lists and numeric information. This can really beef up the value of a Wiki as an Intranet or Project Management application.



• TWiki and others include built-in form generators, allowing you to better track information and interact with Wiki users.



• And, of course, the more advanced Wikis are building in social networking features. Most Wikis support RSS, allowing you to subscribe to page revisions. But newer platforms are adding status updates and Twitter-like functionality.

Before choosing a Wiki platform, ask yourself some key questions:

• Do you need granular security? Advanced Wikis have full-blown user and group-based security and authentication features, much like a standard CMS.



• Should the data be stored in a database? It might be useful or even critical for integration with other systems.



• Does it belong on a local server, or in the cloud? There are plenty of great hosted Wikis, like PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) and WikiSpaces, in addition to all of the Wikis that you can download and install on your own Server. There are even personal Wikis like TiddlyWiki and ZuluPad. I use a Wiki on my Android phone called WikiNotes for my note-keeping.

Are you already using a Wiki? You might be. Google Docs, with it's revision history feature, may look more like a Word processor, but it's a Wiki at heart.