TechnoBabble

My response to Ian’s post…

EXCELLENT idea!  But…

There may actually be a little more to it than simply moving from “here” to “there”.  

My experience at Harvard is that the community relies rather heavily on email-based systems, like the ABCD mailing lists.  

On the other hand, I attempted to start a discussion forum, similar to the way Google Groups works, and was disappointed to find no one would use it.  There appeared to be a stigma against forum-style dialog, wherein posts “live forever”.  Of course we all know thanks to Ollie that email lives forever, and that mailing-lists have archives, but despite this, there is a still some sort of preference in this community to post in a mailing list rather than a forum.  What I’ve discerned is a sense that forums are forever, while email is fleeting, however untrue that perception may be.  And that perception, and possibly the familiarity of the email paradigm, makes the community more comfortable with email than with forums.

And there are plenty of other differences.  Google Groups, like newsgroups and forums, can be made to send email notifications to registered users, but there still seems to be a tendency for users to think of email as “immediate”, whereas forums are more of a “when I get time” (pull, versus push).  In other words, without an active culture that embraces forum style discourse, people use email when they have to have something “now”, and forums are often relegated to the “when I get around to it” category.  Everyone reads their email every day.  Consulting forums seems to be perceived as yet another demand on people’s time.  And without a culture that has come to value the forum style of discourse, it’s not worth people’s time.

For example, I’ve always been told (and personally experienced) the phenomenon that a forum must be “jump started”.  Without an adequate groundswell of users and content to insure that new users find the forum interesting, helpful and provocative, people tend to make short, unsatisfying visits, then never return.

My personal experience is that newsgroups and forums are VASTLY superior to mailing lists for the purposes of knowledge-sharing and collaboration (at least, certain types).  At a previous workplace, “forums” were the single most essential communication link between engineering and field support, and gave the company an enormous advantage over competitors that other forms of communication, like email, “Wikis”, etc. just never came close to.

So, all other considerations aside, I’m completely *FOR* using a forum-style means of communication and collaboration here at Harvard.  In fact, my group has already tried out Google Groups, Google Wave (now defunct) and I even installed a PHP-based forum package on my desktop that we tried for a while.  We even tried using the various forum-style components of other work tools like Daptiv, and the discussion feature in the Wiki (there are also several Drupal installations active here, and Drupal has a very robust discussion group capability).

But I’ve been completely unsuccessful in challenging the mailing list “norm”.  My hope is that we can try this, and that it will be deliriously successful, and that my own experiences with forum use here will be completely atypical.

For example, one forum I created never got a single post.  But when it was switched to a mailing list, I had to unsubscribe at work because I was inundated with email from it! Yet another advantage of forums: unsubscribing doesn’t cause you to miss out on anything.

I’m just worried there is more to the “forum vs. email” issue than may seem obvious on the surface.  

Cultural norms can be very hard to influence.

I look forward to a lively discussion on it, though!

And, by the way, there is an I.T. Summit coming up on June 23rd hosted by the Harvard University Office of the Chief Information Officer.  Several of the breakout sessions are about collaboration technologies, and I plan to attend every one!

Jim Bay