Speak First, Then What? - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 156

He presents his findings at the next Project
Management Meeting, and is very surprised by
the responses.

more forceful in his comments, which turns the
rest of even more. A vicious circle starts.

Some folks need more “airtime”. That is
perfectly normal. When this expression turns
into pontification, especially in commenting
systems or in document posts, it strains the fabric
of a collaborative system. There are few mature
defenses against the usurping of communication
bandwidth.

Bazzar tells him that he is posting every relevant
bit of technical information on the CVS reposi-
tory, where it belongs. He does not want to bore
the other participants with drawings, source code
listings and test results. All that information he
compresses into a weekly report, which he posts
every Friday afternoon. He also adds that he does
not comment on some of the issues he sees, since
his English is not good enough to express himself
formally in a comment. Rather than alienating the
author, he handles these things in person, when
the opportunity arises.

The “Content Generation
Divide” Dysfunctionality

The longer the project runs, the more content
the team amasses in the vault, the more they are
concerned about losing cohesion. More and more,
the team makes decisions without leaving a direct
trace in the repository. Sure, there are meeting
protocols, but they do not capture the way the
team reached the decisions. All those nuances
are lost, all the deep reasoning is not part of the
documentation. Mary said it the best: “We are
using charcoal to draw a rainbow”.

Mary tells him that she does disagree with several
of the documents, but that she resolved the issues
with the authors directly, rather than posting an
impersonal comment.

Mel simply does not have the data to manage
his team's use of the repository. He does not know
how many times they look at documents, and how
long they spend on the document, reading it. He
does not know about the need and reluctance to
comment. He does not see the importance map
of documents. He is flying blind.

Since the commenting feature does not re-
ally work, and capturing the intricate ways of
decision-making is so tedious and subjective, a
lot of the deep reasoning of decision-making is
lost. One of the main drivers for the repository
is the ability to do meaningful post-mortems.
Without the details, such an analysis can only
scratch the surface. Conversations, meetings,
conference phone calls, all this unstructured and
non-Microsoft-Office content dissipates into thin
air. They are vital, though, as studies have shown
as depicted in Figure 3. (MacMillan 2001).
Words only convey 10% of the meaning. Text
is important to make content searchable / find-
able, it is sometimes not enough to make content
understandable. Here, a richer medium, e.g.
captured audio or even video is important. The
collaboration tool needs to be able to seamlessly
integrate these content types without artificial

The “Pontification” Problem

Now that Bazzar has gotten the direction to be
more active in the repository, he starts to add
serious amounts of content and comments. He
quickly overtakes Joe as the main content source,
and finds time to comment on at least half of all
new documents.

The issue is: most of his documents are so tech-
nical in nature that nobody is reading them, and
most of his comments are so long and opinionated
that the others are starting to ignore them. Since
he wants to be relevant, Bazzar starts to be even