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up the courage to confront him in the meeting.
“How is this going to help?” she asked. “I know
my work is not done, why does it make sense to
show something not yet done?” Brazzer told her
about the software development concept of “Ag-
ile Development”, which states “Commit Early,
Commit Often”. In essence, by posting her content
as a “Beta Version”, she allows interested peers
to interact with it before proposing it as the next
version. This interaction, he claims, will make
her work better.
aware of the pending expiration and can evaluate
whether the information in the document is still
relevant and valid. If so, she can either reset the
clock or mark the document as “settled”, mean-
ing the document is not longer maintained and no
more changes will occur. The only actions avail-
able for a “settled” document are “superseded by
a successor” and “deprecated”.
The second alternative of a peer challenge
is harder to implement, and more interesting.
Being able to challenge content's validity and
relevance with regard to its freshness through the
system is potentially powerful. In essence, this
is a miniature workflow through which a reader
can get one more peer to agree the content needs
checking and updating. In the first alternative,
the user flags the document as outdated, which
makes it appear in the list of outdated documents,
highlights it, and informs the author of the flag.
The other approach would allow the user to send
a request to one or more peers directly. If one
of the peers agrees with the request, the system
would flag the document as expired and asks the
author to trigger a refresh.
Mary tries it. She posts her initial draft to the
repository, marking it as “Open for comments”.
Within a few hours, her rather daring thoughts
attract several readers that add their perspective
and thoughts to her work. Mary is not affronted
by their thoughts, because she has not yet final-
ized hers either. Rapid discussions occur which
drive the content to a much higher quality that
previously expected.
Expires By
Preventing content from becoming stale is another
huge task. Generating lots of content is good,
though the sheer mass immediately puts large
amounts of it in danger of becoming obsolete or
irrelevant.A collaborative system that is concerned
about more listening also needs to drive “listening
to yourself”. In essence, somebody needs to check
content regularly to ensure it is still consistent and
relevant. We need to create a permanent “nudge”
connection between the author and her work. There
are two ways to achieve that: reminders for the
author to go check on her work, and the ability to
challenge the validity and relevance of material
through a peer review process.
The first alternative is rather easy to establish.
All contents could receive an expiration date,
which is set/reset at each creation/edit event. The
system might even suggest a new date, depend-
ing on the type of content and its maturity. Then,
when the “end is near”, the author could be made
Mel uploaded the Project Charter at the begin-
ning of the project. After several stage gates
have passed, the project morphed somewhat
under the influence of new market and technol-
ogy insights. The stored charter does not reflect
these changes.
Mary notices this in her follow-up work for Des,
but is not sure whether the changes are really that
pressing. Using the system's “This is outdated”
function, she asks Joe to read the charter quickly
and make a decision on the matter, listing the
concerns she has. The system asks her during this
step whether it should notify Mel of her concern
as well. She declines.
When Joe receives her email, he quickly scans the
document and agrees with Mary, adding comments
of his own to her notice. This triggers a status
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