My name is DeborahHartmann, and I am having a blast discussing all kinds of stuff with my TorCamp cohorts. I see that there's great stuff going on at BarCamp elsewhere too, and I'm wondering... what can we learn from each other, across our continents and oceans? BarCampWorldwide is a great opportunity to find out...
So I'm looking for ways to do RichDistributedCollaboration, and I'm hoping others are too. I see this as an opportunity to make available to our local communities, once a year perhaps, the ability to collaborate with those who have much to contribute but cannot travel to the site of the BarCamp. Now that we are all travelling so much, this happens more and more.
Some key features I think we need, to communicate well:
- technologically accessible (platform neutral?)
- democratic
- user friendly and administrator friendly
- visual
- financially accessible
- multilingual?
Reference
Book: Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn
has great chapters on effective communication, including this graph:
The communication effectiveness curve
,br>"This curve expresses the following ideas:
When two people are talking face-to-face at a whiteboard (Figure 3.4-2), they have access to: real-time question-and-answer, body gestures, physical proximity cues, drawings, vocal inflection, vocal timing as well as words, and cross-modality timing cues. In addition, the whiteboard adds "stickiness" to sections of their discussion that they wish to refer back to.
On the telephone, the people lose proximity cues, visuals, and cross-modality timing, which makes their communication task more difficult. They still have access to vocal inflection and real-time question-and-answer. When they move from the phone to email, they lose both vocal inflection and real-time question-and-answer, but they still can get questions answered during the session.
On videotape, the viewer once again has access to visuals and cross-modality timing, but has lost any chance to get questions answered or otherwise offer feedback to the speaker on what is needed next in the conversation. Audiotape again loses the visual aspects as well as cross-modality timing, and use of paper again loses vocal inflection.
Part of the value of the curve is the way it explains common recommendations by project leads: 'Put all the people into one room" and "Make sure there are whiteboards and coffee corners all over the building.' " -- Alistair Cockburn in "People and Methodologies in Software Development"
