Applied Collaboration: Respect

Yesterday I joined an event of the Digitalks-series in Vienna covering online collaboration. Two youngsters from small new media/consulting companies presented their view on collaboration and the tools they used in their companies.

Michael Schuster from Systemone tried to make a point in introducing his opinion that we actually don’t want to collaborate, we do it, because we are forced to, but we would prefer to do everything alone. To be honest: I don’t get that one. I don’t want to care about graphics crap, I don’t want to do ukrainian, romanian or whatever translations – I simply can’t do that and I’m really and honestly happy if somebody does that for me.

Part of my confusion is possibly due to Schusters definition of collaboration: He though of two ways, real time collaboration and timeshift collaboration. I missed interdisciplinary collaboration or just teamwork – eg I want my translators to create their version as new pages in our wiki, check the Recent Pages list for updates and subscribe to changes in the pages they are actually working on.

The presented tools were ok: Basecamp, Google Docs, Jira and some more.

Mathias Platzer from Knallgrau took us on a short tour through the Knallgrau intranet which is built with Mediawiki, and showed some semi-business use for Jabber, Twitter etc.

He actually likes to collaborate – that’s what he said – and he insisted of the importance of introducing the surrounding processes carefully but strictly.

The following discussion showed on general problem that we face when we want to introduce new media in companies: It will not work if employees don’t feel that they get a lot of respect. And many consultants don’t have that respect. It’s not only direct “human” respect, but also respect for the jobs that people do. Not verzybody is spending al his day in front of a computer. Not everybody considers it as relaxing to check Facebook or Friendfeed for news from the rest of the world. And not everybody thinks that working should or could be fun: It should be fast and efficient and anything new should not cause additional effort.

Some common basis – where I also agree – was that you just have to start with something, think of good usecases, invest a lot of work of your own – and then only you may hope for some success of getting people to collaborate.