Thursday, August 08, 2002

With all the attention that Ray has drawn with his blog and his essay Why collaboration?, its real interesting to note a couple of observations at the COM Interop presentation at the user group tonight. I had Groove running on my notebook and I brought it up a few times to do things. I collaborate with some clients and people with Groove, keeping documents and discussions in sync. I also use it as a better Briefcase. And invariably, the comments were like "Wow, that's cool! I could manage my distributed project that way. I could keep track of bugs across a geographically disperse team that way. And man, you're disconnected and can sync later?" Then all of them would say "Who's Groove?" Its interesting to note that people need this kind of stuff and they have no idea its even out there or who Groove is (none of the developers in the room had ever heard of them). The other application I had running was Radio. Most of the people in the room had no idea of what a Blog was or what blogging was or what Radio was. Again, there was instant recognition of the benefits that could be obtained from collaboration with a blog too. I don't know how to phrase it. I'm not the writer Ray or Dave is but no one knows about this stuff and they should. They want to. It would make their jobs better. It would make communication better. How do we get people to collaborate? 11:11:31 PM

© Copyright 2002 Sam Gentile.