I'm in the process of putting together a White Paper, and as part of the
introduction I've written down a few thoughts about the background for
understanding and enabling ubiquitous collaboration.
I'm looking for some feedback on this, especially relevant history that
I may have missed or misstated and other barriers that people can think
of.
Ill-formed or preliminary off-the-cuff responses are fine and
appropriate given that the source material is really of the same form at
this point.
Ubiquitous Collaboration
Collaboration systems have had an uneven relationship with the
development of personal and interactive computing. Douglas Engelbartís
Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at SRI International is perhaps most
famous for developing the computer mouse. It was however a crucible for
the evolution of computing and succeeded by developing and deploying the
oNLine System (NLS), a computer system that implemented a fully
interactive, collaborative, graphical computing and software development
environment in the late sixties, an era when punched cards and batch
processing were the state of the art for access to computing resources.
The system embedded a completely shared working environment at its core
so that anybody working on any part of the system was always
collaborating with his/her colleagues, either actively or passively. It
was a system of ubiquitous collaboration. His system and ideas catalysed
a revolution in the development of computing environments and personal
computing. Unfortunately, for many reasons both technical and social,
much of the work of this group was either ignored or was transformed
into forms that diminished the role of collaborative work, which was
fundamentally at the core of Engelbartís goals.
In many ways, the system that halted Engelbartís collaborative
enterprise was Email. While simply a small part of his system, it was
delivered in a much simpler, more evolutionary fashion to the broad
community of scientists working in the Arpanet environment. It
presented a just good enough technology that was much more evolutionary
than the radically revolutionary system Engelbart had assembled. Email
became the killer app for the early Arpanet and is in some ways still
the primary collaborative technology in wide deployment today.
The dream of ubiquitous collaboration still remains today, a fundamental
part of what Engelbart has called his Unfinished Revolution. Engelbart
was and is convinced that the only way to really tackle the most
difficult basic problems that we are presented with as individuals,
groups and societies is through a kind of teamwork in which the
accumulated knowledge of the group is necessarily greater than that of
any individual. An individualís role in the collective enterprise is
then to augment the collective knowledge base by observation and
synthesis. The networked computing environment that is now widely
deployed with the Internet and World Wide Web is but one piece of the
whole system needed to truly enable this collaborative knowledge
development. Collaboration is currently a kind of afterthought with much
knowledge work, with each individual locked in his or her own cubicle
between group meetings, exchanging a few email messages when necessary.
We anticipate a work environment in which every person is organically
connected to a team of common purpose no matter what they are doing or
what software they might be using. An individualís thoughts, decisions
and actions become amplified and enhanced by an automatic, seamless
integration with the thoughts, decisions and actions of others. And the
collective enterprise becomes centered on a deeply cross-linked
repository of accumulated knowledge and action, which is completely open
for exploitation and application to any new team activity. It is only
with this kind of infrastructure in place that the true potential for
radical enhancement of efficiency and productivity can be realized.
This will only happen when the barriers to the accumulation of group
knowledge and group processes are torn down.
Barriers
We need to understand those barriers then. There are clearly both
technical and social barriers, with corporate and individual motivations
interfering with collective work. In order to frame this analysis we
will assume that the ìworkerî we will examine is someone Engelbart has
called a ìknowledge worker,î someone whose job or avocation involves the
exploitation, organization and production of knowledge. It is a class
that includes virtually all white-collar workers and managers as well as
reporters, researchers, and anyone doing any kind of paperwork. In many
cases, we are talking about anyone who does or could use a computer for
performing virtually any task.
A huge technical barrier is something I will call the tyranny of format,
the fact that an enormous amount of what could be useful and reusable
knowledge is trapped inside proprietary or inaccessible data formats.
Much of this reality is driven by the fact that virtually every new
application and new version of an application involves the creation of a
new, incompatible data storage format. The barrier to sharing even the
products of work, much less the process, becomes one of incompatibility
of application formats.
Another problem is the disintegration of knowledge, in which the
concentration of work on personal, loosely-networked computers with
distinct data stores means that in many cases the vast preponderance of
potentially exploitable team knowledge is distributed in a completely
inaccessible way on tens or thousands of un-indexed and often
inaccessible individual computers. Many large enterprises attempt to
solve this problem with central data stores and shared filesystems to
ensure that the products of work are centrally maintained and
accessible. Unfortunately, these systems become mandated, imposed
solutions that often do not significantly enhance the productivity of
individual users. Networks are always slower and less reliable than
local storage, so intermediate versions and temporary documents always
stay on local disks. Moreover the means by which the central stores are
organized are rarely appropriate or adaptable to the range of work that
individuals need to perform, so the central store is almost always ìfor
managementî and not ìfor me.î
We can identify another barrier as the transience of history, the loss
of many of the most important pieces of collective knowledge to an
unrecorded and imperfectly recalled past. Consider the ubiquity and
importance of meetings in collective work, all the way from impromptu
ìwater-coolerî meetings to brainstorming sessions to formal meetings.
Every aspect of one of these meetings which goes unrecorded and thus
unintegrated into a collective repository, is thus inaccessible to
anyone but the participants. And even for the participants in these
meetings, so much that is important to the development of ideas is often
lost, with much of the process of producing good ideas and rejecting bad
ones lost to the imperfect memories of only the direct participants.
Even in situations which are completely computer-centered, the history
of a document and the connection between email about a document and the
document itself is often never collected or linked together and is thus
inaccessible to future collaborators or just someone trying to
reconstruct an argument.
Another barrier to the enhancement of collaboration that arises when
considering meetings is the impermanence of passive knowledge, in which
knowledge that is not actively and consciously integrated into the
system is lost. Much of this can be considered to be knowledge of
history, but in this case the emphasis is on the effort often required
to ensure that useful dialogues and observations are actually recorded
and integrated into a collective knowledge base in a useful way. It is
often simple to record and store meetings either with a human note-taker
or a digital recording, but without content-based retrieval mechanisms
and means of exploiting these recordings and integrating them into the
products that are being produced by the team it is of little advantage
to do so.
A more social barrier is the failure of trust, the loss of motivation or
interest in deep collaboration by the breakdown of social conventions
that often accompany attempts at collaborative work, even within teams
of common interest. Some of this breakdown comes from a kind of
disconnection associated with certain forms of communication, such as
email. We are all familiar with how easily perceived insults or real
flames can cause irreparable rifts in relationships when email exchanges
are part of the relationship. Another kind of problem is that the ease
of copying and disguising of documents and the lack of adequate audit
trails can obscure the actual relationships between documents and their
key contributors and thus stand in the way of an individualís commitment
the social contracts that lead to contributing to a collective
endeavour.
If we are to propose a technical solution to these problems, it must
address each of these technical barriers and provide some realization
for the kinds of social support needed to overcome those barriers as
well.
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