Re: defining what we mean by "collaboration"

From: Grant Bowman (grantbow@svpal.org)
Date: Tue Feb 20 2001 - 21:50:40 PST


I'm catching up on my email.

* Eugene Kim <eekim@eekim.com> [010212 17:51]:
> I think that one of our biggest impediments to our collective progress --
> and what I think Jack has been arguing all along -- is that we have not
> developed an ontology for the OHS.
>
> An article in today's USA Today on Ray Ozzie's Groove is a good example of
> how this has hurt us:
>
> http://usatoday.com/usatonline/20010212/3060009s.htm

This link is outdated, unfortunately.

> Groove is clearly a collaboration tool. The article notes:
>
> At GlaxoSmithKline, Calhoun finds Groove enticing. He points out how
> it can be used by teams working to discover drugs. Those teams usually
> consist of some scientists inside the company and some at other
> companies or universities. They need to share sensitive information
> and work together. Yet the members change at different stages of the
> process over many years. "Groove seems to uniquely lend itself to this
> type of problem," Calhoun says.
>
> Strangely enough, I don't think anyone in the group would complain if we
> replaced "Groove" in the paragraph above with "OHS." I also don't think
> anyone would claim that the OHS competes with Groove. I think that the
> OHS and Groove are different, but complementary tools.
>
> The problem is that we haven't defined what we mean when we say we're
> designing a tool for "collaboration." The term means different things to
> different people. The Web, for example, is a legitimate collaboration
> tool. So is e-mail. But they are clearly different beasts. And, if
> you walk up to a group of engineers and tell them to build a collaboration
> tool, some people might go and build the Web, and others might go and
> build an e-mail system or USENET.
>
> Because "collaboration" implied different things for all of us, we
> became afflicted with picture-mismatch. We need to overcome this problem,
> not only so that we can build the system, but so that others can
> understand it as well. It would be an interesting exercise to hear
> people's descriptions of what their picture of the OHS is. Perhaps by
> observing and critiquing each other's pictures, we can come to consensus
> as to what we're trying to do.

 From a higher level, I believe the OHS is a set of tools, a toolbox used
by a set of people, a Networked Improved Community, that know how to make
better tools in addition to what complex and urgent problems they are
trying to solve.

--
-- Grant Bowman                                   <grantbow@svpal.org>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:58:02 PDT