Wednesday, August 07, 2002

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An interesting discussion on the Grooveforums about the question if Groove can be blocked completely.  Phil Stanhope responds : The real question remains: Why are the employees of your firm seeking to improve communications with external business partners?  If you believe that this is, not in fact the use case in your firm, then you've got a signicantly more difficult problem. Any technology that can be used easily and is readily available threatens your corporate integrity: telephone, fax, WiFi, HTTP POST, WebDAV, CDRW, 1394, USB, Serial and Parallel ports, printers, copy machines, and scanners to name a few. Then there's the plain old analog p2p (people-to-people) problem.

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Ray Ozzie : Personal technology - that is, technology that empowers from the bottom-up, can yield immediate and direct local value, and effects grass-roots transformation.  Think 1-2-3, not ERP.  Think pairware or peerware, not groupware.

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Jon Udell reacts on Ray Ozzie These are all the right questions. To answer them, I think we have to do the experiment. When some of us tried one recently, it was illuminating all around, for Groovers and for bloggers. Effective communication always has required the ability to compartmentalize, to empathize with and belong to different groups, to manage multiple layers of meaning, to project a range of identities. Now that we have so many modes of communication to choose from, balancing the interplay of public and private modes has gotten trickier. For what it's worth, my gut tells me that we need to have a set of flexible frameworks in place, to get people using them in a variety of boundary-crossing scenarios, and then to adapt the technology as needs and opportunities arise. Because of Jon's post I’m receiving some requests from people who want to join this Groovespace but it doesn't exist anymore. However the transcripts of the discussion in that space are published here, archived for future reference. This experiment was a temporarily event, a kind of spontaneous online conference, where a group of people with similar interests gathered together in the same place for a couple of days exchanging ideas and getting to know each other a bit on a more personal level. I feel that Groove is the next best thing to meeting in real life for building relationships and a high traffic Groovespace , like this one, can be a very direct, intensive and sometimes even exhausting environment and in this case, like a real life event, shouldn't last too long. I'm glad i've had this experience and this is surely something to repeat. I've got to know interesting new people and it offered me a lot of food for thought on the boundaries between public and private discussion and how to balance them to create a fruitful environment for collaboration.