Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 1 of 21

Research Topics in Collaboration

Phil Wolff

21 October 2009

1. Introduction .............................................. 2

2. Collaboration in Skype’s Roadmap ............ 3

1. Until now… ................................... 3

2. Skype will commoditize minutes and Make Skype minutes more valuable ................. 3

3. Collaboration Research will show how to make Skype minutes worth more ..................... 4

4. Collaboration is a competitive edge .......................... 5

3. Research Areas .......................................... 6

A. Get Started ......................................... 7

1. Ridiculously Easy Group Formation ..................................... 7

2. Group Goal Forming ...................... 7

3. To Do Lists, Calendars, Personal Time Management, and Getting Things Done Together ....................................... 8

4. Fame and Reputation .................... 9

B. Be Better Together ........................... 11

5. Augmenting Inline Conversation............................... 11

6. From Discovery to Action ............ 12

7. Decision Making and Decision Support ........................ 12

8. Collaboration Afoot .................... 13

9. Situational Awareness ................ 14

10. How Collaborators Use Search and Personal/Collective memory ....... 14

11. Gestures of Tomorrow ............... 15

C. Cross Boundaries ............................. 16

12. Intergroup Collaboration ............ 16

13. Earning Trust and Using Whuffie ...................................... 16

14. Collective Presence and Project Presence/ActivityStreams ........... 17

15. Transparency and Collaboration.............................. 18

16. Backchannels.............................. 18

17. Scaling Collaboration from Tasks to Projects to Programmes ............................... 19

4. About Phil Wolff ..................................... 21

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 2 of 21

1. Introduction

I’ve been blogging about collaboration since 1998. If

the 1990s were about personal productivity, and the

2000s were about connecting the world, then this next

decade will be about working together. I’m happy the

new Skype Labs is working on the future of

collaboration.

What don’t we know? What can we learn about

conversations that result in work product? What can

we learn from failures? What knowledge could

unleash the collective power of five hundred million

Skype users?

In this paper I outline areas of study that could shape

the design of collaboration tools and technologies.

Before outlining a few areas I’d love to investigate,

let’s look at how collaboration fits into Skype’s future.

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 3 of 21

2. Collaboration in Skype’s Roadmap

1. Until now…

I see two stages of Skype’s product innovation in its

first six years.

Skype made VoIP easy and reliable. Then it poured the

network into many operating systems, mobility and

devices. Now everyone has more access to the Skype

network. [Somewhere along the way Skype played

with video, games, commerce, and public voice

forums. Some failed; others, like video, are here to

stay.]

These innovations gave Skype a large, growing user

population. Sadly, its rate of growth is slowing.

2. Skype will commoditize minutes and Make Skype

minutes more valuable

Skype’s next major stage of product innovation does

two opposing things at the same time.

On the one hand, Skype is commoditizing its

infrastructure. Skype has been opening up its network

and telephony services to third-party distributors and

developers. You can see this in Skype For SIP, Skype for

Asterisk, and the web platform being built on Skype

Lite. So while Skype sells minutes, third-parties

innovate with vertical applications.

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 4 of 21

On the other hand, Skype will add value to its core talk

service. Skype will pursue adjacent markets like voice,

video, and web conferencing. Skype will compete by

being cheaper and more convenient than the

incumbents.

Competitors with their own network effects will add

Skype-like features. So Skype must learn how to add

value in the work context beyond cost savings. Skype

will want to design and engineer services so Skype

conversations become more fun, satisfying, productive,

and effective than having those same conversations

without Skype.

3. Collaboration Research will show how to make Skype

minutes worth more

How? The way to make Skype minutes better than

other minutes is to enhance Skype’s inherent support

for collaboration. Multiple people getting things done

together. These research areas will provide the

insights, measurements, and experience Skype needs

to make Skype the best brand for conversations that

produce results.

If Skype’s first slogan was “It just works,” its next could

be “You just work!”

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 5 of 21

4. Collaboration is a competitive edge

Many of Skype’s serious competitors fall into three

categories. Low cost telephony and IM, VoIP and

unified communications appliances, and conferencing

services.

While they differ in modes, marketing, and value

propositions, they all offer communications transport

and some light directory service.

They don’t make you a better communicator. A better

collaborator. A better teammate. A better leader.

Skype could.

Skype could advance the best collaboration practices

and technology. And with Skype’s distribution (one

billion accounts by 2013), could easily become the tool

of choice for producing results, enjoying your job, and

building economic security.

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 6 of 21

3. Research Areas

Themes within these research areas:

Talk is a component within larger relationships

Talk systems are part of a larger interconnected

network of information systems

Work adds constraints that help focus

conversation

Collaboration as collective productivity

These research areas fall in three clusters:

Getting started

Being Better Together

Crossing Boundaries

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A. Get Started

1. Ridiculously Easy Group Formation

Ridiculously Easy Group Formation1,2 is a knowledge

management term. It refers to forming groups from

informal organization, as opposed to a formal

organizational process, and using social media tools to

eliminate barriers to people finding each other for

collaboration and developing community.

As our social circles become more connected through

many systems, what strategies will find the best

people to invite to a given group?

What can we do to further reduce the effort and

increase the quality of recruiting?

How do we help a good mix of psychologies,

experience and talents balance a new group?

What can be done during the recruiting process to

socialize the members to speed the time to work and

readiness to engage?

2. Group Goal Forming

How do groups work?

1 “Making group-forming ridiculously easy,” Sebastien Paquet, October 09, 2002

http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/10/09.html#a426 2 “Groups,” Designing Social Interfaces wiki, February 2009

http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php?title=Groups#Ridiculously_Easy_Group_Formation

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 8 of 21

How does a group work together to establish and

define goals that get the biggest collective

commitment but also make choices that are right for

the group and right for the group’s stakeholders?

How does iteration and feedback improve or damage

the quality of a group’s goal setting?

What can be done to turn tacit hopes into explicit

goals?

How is goal setting different for casual goals (quick,

safe, easy) than for serious goals (long term, risky,

difficult)?

When do participants find review of prior goals and

results more useful than starting fresh?

3. To Do Lists, Calendars, Personal Time Management,

and Getting Things Done Together

How do our conversation and collaboration tools

interact with metawork resources?

Metawork is “work about work;” activities that help us

block out our time

manage our priorities

collaborate with other people

to discover

what should be done,

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 9 of 21

who should do the work,

when people should work, and

when we should do things together.

How can we smoothly launch conversations from

metawork tools?

How can we blend metawork tools into our

conversations, the better to schedule follow-up and

engage the right people?

Where does talk (calls, meetings, interviews, chats) fit

into popular systems of time management, project

planning, personal scheduling, and work prioritization?

4. Fame and Reputation

What we say and do informs how others see us.

That perception influences how we are recruited for

projects and communities, how we are used once

inside, and roles and relationships we form within

collaboration.

How can we measure, visualize, and manage our fame?

How do we increase the breadth of our fame?

How do we target fame to specific publics?

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 10 of 21

For whom is it important to keep their public identities

well bounded? (Mr. Smith at the office, Pastor Smith at

church, Billy at the pub, BloodyHell in his death metal

band)

How do we tune the handful of ideas connected to our

name and face?

How can we better construct tools that draw us to

better conversations?

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 11 of 21

B. Be Better Together

5. Augmenting Inline Conversation

Can we make the team smarter during a call?

Bots have long been a fixture of IRC and instant

messaging. They welcome and announce new

members to a chat, search Google, and look up stock

prices. What else can they do?

Can they “time box” meetings to keep them on

schedule and cover agenda points?

Can they listen for keywords and pull up relevant links

and data, bringing the real-time world into a

conversation?

How do bots affect participants differently in voice and

video conference calls?

Can bots improve contextual awareness to facilitate

team relationships and focus on goals?

Can we identify human problems, emotions and

tension, unaired issues that interfere with rapport,

trust, and direction?

What affordances would be widely useful to designers

of inline extensions?

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6. From Discovery to Action

Of a thousand open source projects started, only a few

survive their first month. We see this in grassroots

politics and at the office. People get excited about an

idea but they never seem to hit the tipping point

where enthusiasm turns into action.

Perhaps this is a good thing, natural selection culling

bad ideas.

But what if the failure to ignite a group, to turn a

gaggle of strangers into a workgroup producing results,

what if that failure can be avoided?

What if the digital medium gets out of the way?

Can user experiences improve group cohesion?

Can we make it easier for individuals to psychologically

commit and follow through?

Can we help teams visualize the work, deliverables,

and benefits to come?

Can we increase the rates of collective investment and

personal resolve?

Can we improve the chances of good ideas surviving

the early days?

7. Decision Making and Decision Support

Many strategies help teams overcome barriers to

making better decisions.

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 13 of 21

The loudest person in the room can dominate a

conversation and narrow possibilities. The most

persuasive, charming or best looking person in the

room might have undue influence.

Some tools3 add anonymous or “blind” annotation of a

discussion with tools for ranking and voting on what’s

important, what’s risky, and other elements of

decision making.

How can we help collaborators avoid groupthink?

How can we help deliberators visualize their choices?

8. Collaboration Afoot

How is collaboration different when people are

walking and driving around?

How is field collaboration different than sitting at a

desk, when you are able to devote more attention

with a bigger visual field? With different distractions?

We can look at games in the real world and various

forms of field work involving collaboration. How do

sports teams and paramedics and SWAT teams train

for mobile collaboration?

What can we apply to the design of mobile products?

3 http://GroupSystems.com, maker of ThinkTank, GroupSystems, 520 Zang Street, Suite 211, Broomfield, CO 80021

USA

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9. Situational Awareness

We’re awash in information about what’s going on

outside the work context and increasingly inside the

work context.

What can we do to improve our filtering to find

appropriate situational awareness4 before and during

project sessions?

How do people need their situational awareness to

change over the life of a project? Of a working

relationship?

How can we add social peripheral vision5 to user

experience without disrupting productive flow states6?

10. How Collaborators Use Search and

Personal/Collective memory

How important is it to quickly and easily locate threads

of conversation, to locate specific facts and artifacts of

discussion?

What parts of conversation history help the current

collaboration?

What design cues and affordances help this?

4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness

5 http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2006/07/blind_mens_base.html

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 15 of 21

What are the thresholds for quality to make the search

worthwhile in this context?

How important is it to have search and personal and

collective memory inside your communications tool vs.

outside (in third party services and tools)?

11. Gestures of Tomorrow

What verbal and non-verbal behaviors do people use

to let other people know that they are paying

attention? Or that they are interested or they are not

interested or they like each other or they are still alive?

We’ve seen small gestures7 like emoticons and

facebook pokes and throwing sheep and vampire bites,

invitations to play, sharing of links and other lifestream

applications.

What gestures are coming?

What sorts of gestures might facilitate the various

prerequisites for interpersonal behavior in the context

of work?

How do these gestures build peripheral social

awareness?8

7 “a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information.”

– Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic, 9 October 2009 8 See post by danah boyd, Twitter: "pointless babble" or peripheral awareness + social grooming?,

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/08/16/twitter_pointle.html. 16 August 2009

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 16 of 21

C. Cross Boundaries

12. Intergroup Collaboration

My team’s all formed up. Your team’s all formed up.

How do our teams come together to play, to fight, to

work, to get something done?

What are the common mistakes when groups come

together? How do those mistakes vary based on the

number of groups, sizes of groups, and differences in

social norms?

What designs help avoid those mistakes? What

designs encourage individuals to act well to improve

intergroup collaboration?

How do we develop common vocabulary and a shared

model of the work to be done?

13. Earning Trust and Using Whuffie

How is trust formed? How does it show up? How can

we measure it? Is trust earned differently in different

modes of communication?

How do you build the trust and whuffie9 needed to be

effective in collaboration?

What are the common barriers to trust formation?

When do they serve a useful purpose, and when don’t

they? 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 17 of 21

What can be done to improve the speed at which trust

is earned without damaging the quality of that trust?

Can you infer from collaborator behavior who-trusts-

whom and how much?

How transitive and transferrable is trust?10 How much

does your trust in Mary affect the trust others have in

Mary?

How much of the trust you earn in prior collaborations

is transferable to your next one?

What is the rate of decay of whuffie?

14. Collective Presence and Project

Presence/ActivityStreams

Presence started as the “Do Not Disturb” button on

phones, a signal about your availability11.

Personal presence is now richer, where you tweet

what you’re doing, share how you’re feeling in mood

messages, and broadcast questions and requests. This

new presence signals seek context-specific responses.

How does presence play in collaboration?

How do you blend a team’s updates into a useful view

of the whole? 12

10

Social Software Alliance, Whuffie limitations, http://www.socialtext.net/ssa/index.cgi?whuffie 11

“Presence: Six Things to Learn from the Do Not Disturb (DND) Button,” Phil Wolff, Skype Journal, 27 May 2007 http://skypejournal.com/blog/2007/05/presence_six_things_to_learn_f.html 12 “Collective Presence Helps Nomads Do The Right Things”, Phil Wolff, Skype Journal, 4 December 4 2008

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 18 of 21

How do share that with other teams and stakeholders?

How do you bring to the fore the most relevant view

of a project’s presence?

How do you collect and share presence data reliably

across systems?

15. Transparency and Collaboration

How important are boundaries that protect the

privacy and intimacy of conversations and work in

progress?

For what kinds of work does transparency help work

product?

How does transparency improve trust within a team?

Between a team and its stakeholders?

16. Backchannels

Live conferences add backchannels13 where audiences

participate during presentations. Some are closed

channels, like a Skype multichat. Others are

hashtagged twitter streams updated in real time. They

give voice to those forced to listen and a way for

presenters to listen to their audience without

interruption.

13

“Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 19 of 21

How can we bring backchannels to online meetings

and presentations, to help conversations scale with

many participants?

How much can we improve attention, participation,

engagement, and post-meeting memory through

backchannels?

Can we bring the Law Of Two Feet14 to online

conferencing?

17. Scaling Collaboration from Tasks to Projects to

Programmes

How many people can you keep in your head? With

how many people can you establish close relationships?

Dunbar Numbers15 suggest we mentally model natural

quantum thresholds at 15 and 150 people. These

appear to be based on cognitive limits: the number of

people to whom we can pay attention, apply our time,

and devote our personality.

Do those numbers still apply in a highly virtual world?

What can we do to manage scale?

14 “Every individual has two feet, and must be prepared to use them. Responsibility for a successful outcome in any

Open Space Event resides with exactly one person -- each participant. Individuals can make a difference and must make a difference. If that is not true in a given situation, they, and they alone, must take responsibility to use their two feet, and move to a new place where they can make a difference. This departure need not be made in anger or hostility, but only after honoring the people involved and the space they occupy. By word or gesture, indicate that you have nothing further to contribute, wish them well, and go and do something useful.” -- Harrison Owen, A Brief User's Guide To Open Space Technology, http://www.openspaceworld.com/users_guide.htm

15 “The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes,” Christopher Allen, http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 20 of 21

What qualitative changes to the effectiveness of

collaboration come from scale? Collaborations scale

up from a single person with an assignment to small

teams and bigger teams with projects up to multiple

teams working on a project.

What communication issues relate directly to scale?

Phil Wolff, @evanwolf 21 of 21

4. About Phil Wolff

Phil Wolff

Skype:evanwolf | +1-510-444-8234 | @evanwolf |

editor@skypejournal.com

245 Lee Street 214, Oakland, CA 94610-4209

Phil Wolff is a thought leader in social media and human capital. He is

the managing editor and publisher of the independent Skype Journal,

established in 2005. Wolff is on the 2009 steering committee for the

DataPortability Project, a public interest technology organization, and is

active in other technology standards communities.

Blogging on management strategy and information technology since

1998, he successfully field tested social media and emergent

organization for eighteen months in the 2004 John Kerry presidential

campaign, producing one million phone calls to swing states through a

local grassroots community. Wolff was an entrepreneur in residence at

the world’s largest staffing company, an operations research analyst for

the U.S. Navy, an IT architect and project manager for a custom

semiconductor company, a corporate sales trainer, channel sales

manager, and marketing manager.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/philwolff

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