Collaborating around the Collaborative Technologies Conference

Greg and I joined panels at CTC which brought together a really great set of speakers from John Seely Brown to Rod Boothby of Ernst & Young and Larry Cannell of Ford Motor. My take away from the conference? Collaboration isn't about documents anymore (and never was).

Collaboration is about the building and evolution of ideas as much as it is about building a product, which is traditionally seen as a document.

Collaboration happens within the context of the communication process. While it supports goal driven activities, on-line collaboration captures thought process and provides context for the activities which supports the thought process for those involved throughout and the up to speed process for those who join mid-stream.

Participants in a process need and want to collaborate in this way. The fall out captured in blogs from this conference is case and point. This is not to exclude the importance of the direct face to face interaction that was central to the conference. Collaboration and knowledge management is very much a social issue requiring various levels of interaction, norming and trust building. Practically functioning as a team, Attendees and speakers alike worked together to document the conference, synthesize the messages, and build on the ideas.

Bob Doyle wrote a piece in EContent about When to Wiki, When to Blog.

Directly or indirectly, Andrew McAfee from HBS rebutted with a piece titled From Freeform to What Form? where he comments on Rod Boothby's question about when to blog or wiki. Rod's presentation focused on where blogs and wikis fit in collaborative work and within the context of IT infrastructure. Andrew asks why a company interested in Enterprise 2.0 would not do both?

Larry Cannell describes Wikis as a New Paradigm for Document Collaboration, suggesting we use hypertext to take the document out of the file.

I build on the point right here: Wiki and blog "modes" are useful in some contexts, but in enterprise contexts, the need is to merge them to support chronological styles of communication with collaborative editing of persistent content like FAQs, Definitions and Requirements. Greg Lloyd dives deeper on the subject in Beyond blogs and wikis.

While Rod, Andrew and Bob covered technology issues coming out of the conference, Annette Kramer focuses on the conference threads which focused on building a better conference. Lets hope her thoughts are captured and the conference one-ups itself next time around!