Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 1 of 21
Research Topics in Collaboration
Phil Wolff
21 October 2009
1. Introduction .............................................. 2
2. Collaboration in Skype’s Roadmap ............ 3
1. Until now… ................................... 3
2. Skype will commoditize minutes and Make Skype minutes more valuable ................. 3
3. Collaboration Research will show how to make Skype minutes worth more ..................... 4
4. Collaboration is a competitive edge .......................... 5
3. Research Areas .......................................... 6
A. Get Started ......................................... 7
1. Ridiculously Easy Group Formation ..................................... 7
2. Group Goal Forming ...................... 7
3. To Do Lists, Calendars, Personal Time Management, and Getting Things Done Together ....................................... 8
4. Fame and Reputation .................... 9
B. Be Better Together ........................... 11
5. Augmenting Inline Conversation............................... 11
6. From Discovery to Action ............ 12
7. Decision Making and Decision Support ........................ 12
8. Collaboration Afoot .................... 13
9. Situational Awareness ................ 14
10. How Collaborators Use Search and Personal/Collective memory ....... 14
11. Gestures of Tomorrow ............... 15
C. Cross Boundaries ............................. 16
12. Intergroup Collaboration ............ 16
13. Earning Trust and Using Whuffie ...................................... 16
14. Collective Presence and Project Presence/ActivityStreams ........... 17
15. Transparency and Collaboration.............................. 18
16. Backchannels.............................. 18
17. Scaling Collaboration from Tasks to Projects to Programmes ............................... 19
4. About Phil Wolff ..................................... 21
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 2 of 21
1. Introduction
I’ve been blogging about collaboration since 1998. If
the 1990s were about personal productivity, and the
2000s were about connecting the world, then this next
decade will be about working together. I’m happy the
new Skype Labs is working on the future of
collaboration.
What don’t we know? What can we learn about
conversations that result in work product? What can
we learn from failures? What knowledge could
unleash the collective power of five hundred million
Skype users?
In this paper I outline areas of study that could shape
the design of collaboration tools and technologies.
Before outlining a few areas I’d love to investigate,
let’s look at how collaboration fits into Skype’s future.
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 3 of 21
2. Collaboration in Skype’s Roadmap
1. Until now…
I see two stages of Skype’s product innovation in its
first six years.
Skype made VoIP easy and reliable. Then it poured the
network into many operating systems, mobility and
devices. Now everyone has more access to the Skype
network. [Somewhere along the way Skype played
with video, games, commerce, and public voice
forums. Some failed; others, like video, are here to
stay.]
These innovations gave Skype a large, growing user
population. Sadly, its rate of growth is slowing.
2. Skype will commoditize minutes and Make Skype
minutes more valuable
Skype’s next major stage of product innovation does
two opposing things at the same time.
On the one hand, Skype is commoditizing its
infrastructure. Skype has been opening up its network
and telephony services to third-party distributors and
developers. You can see this in Skype For SIP, Skype for
Asterisk, and the web platform being built on Skype
Lite. So while Skype sells minutes, third-parties
innovate with vertical applications.
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 4 of 21
On the other hand, Skype will add value to its core talk
service. Skype will pursue adjacent markets like voice,
video, and web conferencing. Skype will compete by
being cheaper and more convenient than the
incumbents.
Competitors with their own network effects will add
Skype-like features. So Skype must learn how to add
value in the work context beyond cost savings. Skype
will want to design and engineer services so Skype
conversations become more fun, satisfying, productive,
and effective than having those same conversations
without Skype.
3. Collaboration Research will show how to make Skype
minutes worth more
How? The way to make Skype minutes better than
other minutes is to enhance Skype’s inherent support
for collaboration. Multiple people getting things done
together. These research areas will provide the
insights, measurements, and experience Skype needs
to make Skype the best brand for conversations that
produce results.
If Skype’s first slogan was “It just works,” its next could
be “You just work!”
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 5 of 21
4. Collaboration is a competitive edge
Many of Skype’s serious competitors fall into three
categories. Low cost telephony and IM, VoIP and
unified communications appliances, and conferencing
services.
While they differ in modes, marketing, and value
propositions, they all offer communications transport
and some light directory service.
They don’t make you a better communicator. A better
collaborator. A better teammate. A better leader.
Skype could.
Skype could advance the best collaboration practices
and technology. And with Skype’s distribution (one
billion accounts by 2013), could easily become the tool
of choice for producing results, enjoying your job, and
building economic security.
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 6 of 21
3. Research Areas
Themes within these research areas:
Talk is a component within larger relationships
Talk systems are part of a larger interconnected
network of information systems
Work adds constraints that help focus
conversation
Collaboration as collective productivity
These research areas fall in three clusters:
Getting started
Being Better Together
Crossing Boundaries
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 7 of 21
A. Get Started
1. Ridiculously Easy Group Formation
Ridiculously Easy Group Formation1,2 is a knowledge
management term. It refers to forming groups from
informal organization, as opposed to a formal
organizational process, and using social media tools to
eliminate barriers to people finding each other for
collaboration and developing community.
As our social circles become more connected through
many systems, what strategies will find the best
people to invite to a given group?
What can we do to further reduce the effort and
increase the quality of recruiting?
How do we help a good mix of psychologies,
experience and talents balance a new group?
What can be done during the recruiting process to
socialize the members to speed the time to work and
readiness to engage?
2. Group Goal Forming
How do groups work?
1 “Making group-forming ridiculously easy,” Sebastien Paquet, October 09, 2002
http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/10/09.html#a426 2 “Groups,” Designing Social Interfaces wiki, February 2009
http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php?title=Groups#Ridiculously_Easy_Group_Formation
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 8 of 21
How does a group work together to establish and
define goals that get the biggest collective
commitment but also make choices that are right for
the group and right for the group’s stakeholders?
How does iteration and feedback improve or damage
the quality of a group’s goal setting?
What can be done to turn tacit hopes into explicit
goals?
How is goal setting different for casual goals (quick,
safe, easy) than for serious goals (long term, risky,
difficult)?
When do participants find review of prior goals and
results more useful than starting fresh?
3. To Do Lists, Calendars, Personal Time Management,
and Getting Things Done Together
How do our conversation and collaboration tools
interact with metawork resources?
Metawork is “work about work;” activities that help us
block out our time
manage our priorities
collaborate with other people
to discover
what should be done,
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 9 of 21
who should do the work,
when people should work, and
when we should do things together.
How can we smoothly launch conversations from
metawork tools?
How can we blend metawork tools into our
conversations, the better to schedule follow-up and
engage the right people?
Where does talk (calls, meetings, interviews, chats) fit
into popular systems of time management, project
planning, personal scheduling, and work prioritization?
4. Fame and Reputation
What we say and do informs how others see us.
That perception influences how we are recruited for
projects and communities, how we are used once
inside, and roles and relationships we form within
collaboration.
How can we measure, visualize, and manage our fame?
How do we increase the breadth of our fame?
How do we target fame to specific publics?
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 10 of 21
For whom is it important to keep their public identities
well bounded? (Mr. Smith at the office, Pastor Smith at
church, Billy at the pub, BloodyHell in his death metal
band)
How do we tune the handful of ideas connected to our
name and face?
How can we better construct tools that draw us to
better conversations?
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 11 of 21
B. Be Better Together
5. Augmenting Inline Conversation
Can we make the team smarter during a call?
Bots have long been a fixture of IRC and instant
messaging. They welcome and announce new
members to a chat, search Google, and look up stock
prices. What else can they do?
Can they “time box” meetings to keep them on
schedule and cover agenda points?
Can they listen for keywords and pull up relevant links
and data, bringing the real-time world into a
conversation?
How do bots affect participants differently in voice and
video conference calls?
Can bots improve contextual awareness to facilitate
team relationships and focus on goals?
Can we identify human problems, emotions and
tension, unaired issues that interfere with rapport,
trust, and direction?
What affordances would be widely useful to designers
of inline extensions?
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6. From Discovery to Action
Of a thousand open source projects started, only a few
survive their first month. We see this in grassroots
politics and at the office. People get excited about an
idea but they never seem to hit the tipping point
where enthusiasm turns into action.
Perhaps this is a good thing, natural selection culling
bad ideas.
But what if the failure to ignite a group, to turn a
gaggle of strangers into a workgroup producing results,
what if that failure can be avoided?
What if the digital medium gets out of the way?
Can user experiences improve group cohesion?
Can we make it easier for individuals to psychologically
commit and follow through?
Can we help teams visualize the work, deliverables,
and benefits to come?
Can we increase the rates of collective investment and
personal resolve?
Can we improve the chances of good ideas surviving
the early days?
7. Decision Making and Decision Support
Many strategies help teams overcome barriers to
making better decisions.
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 13 of 21
The loudest person in the room can dominate a
conversation and narrow possibilities. The most
persuasive, charming or best looking person in the
room might have undue influence.
Some tools3 add anonymous or “blind” annotation of a
discussion with tools for ranking and voting on what’s
important, what’s risky, and other elements of
decision making.
How can we help collaborators avoid groupthink?
How can we help deliberators visualize their choices?
8. Collaboration Afoot
How is collaboration different when people are
walking and driving around?
How is field collaboration different than sitting at a
desk, when you are able to devote more attention
with a bigger visual field? With different distractions?
We can look at games in the real world and various
forms of field work involving collaboration. How do
sports teams and paramedics and SWAT teams train
for mobile collaboration?
What can we apply to the design of mobile products?
3 http://GroupSystems.com, maker of ThinkTank, GroupSystems, 520 Zang Street, Suite 211, Broomfield, CO 80021
USA
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9. Situational Awareness
We’re awash in information about what’s going on
outside the work context and increasingly inside the
work context.
What can we do to improve our filtering to find
appropriate situational awareness4 before and during
project sessions?
How do people need their situational awareness to
change over the life of a project? Of a working
relationship?
How can we add social peripheral vision5 to user
experience without disrupting productive flow states6?
10. How Collaborators Use Search and
Personal/Collective memory
How important is it to quickly and easily locate threads
of conversation, to locate specific facts and artifacts of
discussion?
What parts of conversation history help the current
collaboration?
What design cues and affordances help this?
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness
5 http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2006/07/blind_mens_base.html
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 15 of 21
What are the thresholds for quality to make the search
worthwhile in this context?
How important is it to have search and personal and
collective memory inside your communications tool vs.
outside (in third party services and tools)?
11. Gestures of Tomorrow
What verbal and non-verbal behaviors do people use
to let other people know that they are paying
attention? Or that they are interested or they are not
interested or they like each other or they are still alive?
We’ve seen small gestures7 like emoticons and
facebook pokes and throwing sheep and vampire bites,
invitations to play, sharing of links and other lifestream
applications.
What gestures are coming?
What sorts of gestures might facilitate the various
prerequisites for interpersonal behavior in the context
of work?
How do these gestures build peripheral social
awareness?8
7 “a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information.”
– Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic, 9 October 2009 8 See post by danah boyd, Twitter: "pointless babble" or peripheral awareness + social grooming?,
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/08/16/twitter_pointle.html. 16 August 2009
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 16 of 21
C. Cross Boundaries
12. Intergroup Collaboration
My team’s all formed up. Your team’s all formed up.
How do our teams come together to play, to fight, to
work, to get something done?
What are the common mistakes when groups come
together? How do those mistakes vary based on the
number of groups, sizes of groups, and differences in
social norms?
What designs help avoid those mistakes? What
designs encourage individuals to act well to improve
intergroup collaboration?
How do we develop common vocabulary and a shared
model of the work to be done?
13. Earning Trust and Using Whuffie
How is trust formed? How does it show up? How can
we measure it? Is trust earned differently in different
modes of communication?
How do you build the trust and whuffie9 needed to be
effective in collaboration?
What are the common barriers to trust formation?
When do they serve a useful purpose, and when don’t
they? 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 17 of 21
What can be done to improve the speed at which trust
is earned without damaging the quality of that trust?
Can you infer from collaborator behavior who-trusts-
whom and how much?
How transitive and transferrable is trust?10 How much
does your trust in Mary affect the trust others have in
Mary?
How much of the trust you earn in prior collaborations
is transferable to your next one?
What is the rate of decay of whuffie?
14. Collective Presence and Project
Presence/ActivityStreams
Presence started as the “Do Not Disturb” button on
phones, a signal about your availability11.
Personal presence is now richer, where you tweet
what you’re doing, share how you’re feeling in mood
messages, and broadcast questions and requests. This
new presence signals seek context-specific responses.
How does presence play in collaboration?
How do you blend a team’s updates into a useful view
of the whole? 12
10
Social Software Alliance, Whuffie limitations, http://www.socialtext.net/ssa/index.cgi?whuffie 11
“Presence: Six Things to Learn from the Do Not Disturb (DND) Button,” Phil Wolff, Skype Journal, 27 May 2007 http://skypejournal.com/blog/2007/05/presence_six_things_to_learn_f.html 12 “Collective Presence Helps Nomads Do The Right Things”, Phil Wolff, Skype Journal, 4 December 4 2008
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 18 of 21
How do share that with other teams and stakeholders?
How do you bring to the fore the most relevant view
of a project’s presence?
How do you collect and share presence data reliably
across systems?
15. Transparency and Collaboration
How important are boundaries that protect the
privacy and intimacy of conversations and work in
progress?
For what kinds of work does transparency help work
product?
How does transparency improve trust within a team?
Between a team and its stakeholders?
16. Backchannels
Live conferences add backchannels13 where audiences
participate during presentations. Some are closed
channels, like a Skype multichat. Others are
hashtagged twitter streams updated in real time. They
give voice to those forced to listen and a way for
presenters to listen to their audience without
interruption.
13
“Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 19 of 21
How can we bring backchannels to online meetings
and presentations, to help conversations scale with
many participants?
How much can we improve attention, participation,
engagement, and post-meeting memory through
backchannels?
Can we bring the Law Of Two Feet14 to online
conferencing?
17. Scaling Collaboration from Tasks to Projects to
Programmes
How many people can you keep in your head? With
how many people can you establish close relationships?
Dunbar Numbers15 suggest we mentally model natural
quantum thresholds at 15 and 150 people. These
appear to be based on cognitive limits: the number of
people to whom we can pay attention, apply our time,
and devote our personality.
Do those numbers still apply in a highly virtual world?
What can we do to manage scale?
14 “Every individual has two feet, and must be prepared to use them. Responsibility for a successful outcome in any
Open Space Event resides with exactly one person -- each participant. Individuals can make a difference and must make a difference. If that is not true in a given situation, they, and they alone, must take responsibility to use their two feet, and move to a new place where they can make a difference. This departure need not be made in anger or hostility, but only after honoring the people involved and the space they occupy. By word or gesture, indicate that you have nothing further to contribute, wish them well, and go and do something useful.” -- Harrison Owen, A Brief User's Guide To Open Space Technology, http://www.openspaceworld.com/users_guide.htm
15 “The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes,” Christopher Allen, http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 20 of 21
What qualitative changes to the effectiveness of
collaboration come from scale? Collaborations scale
up from a single person with an assignment to small
teams and bigger teams with projects up to multiple
teams working on a project.
What communication issues relate directly to scale?
Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 21 of 21
4. About Phil Wolff
Phil Wolff
Skype:evanwolf | +1-510-444-8234 | @evanwolf |
245 Lee Street 214, Oakland, CA 94610-4209
Phil Wolff is a thought leader in social media and human capital. He is
the managing editor and publisher of the independent Skype Journal,
established in 2005. Wolff is on the 2009 steering committee for the
DataPortability Project, a public interest technology organization, and is
active in other technology standards communities.
Blogging on management strategy and information technology since
1998, he successfully field tested social media and emergent
organization for eighteen months in the 2004 John Kerry presidential
campaign, producing one million phone calls to swing states through a
local grassroots community. Wolff was an entrepreneur in residence at
the world’s largest staffing company, an operations research analyst for
the U.S. Navy, an IT architect and project manager for a custom
semiconductor company, a corporate sales trainer, channel sales
manager, and marketing manager.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/philwolff
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