May 2003 | Traction - Weblogs grow up

Clay Shirky's writes about Traction in the May 2003 issue of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, Social Software: A New Generation of Tools. Issue Abstract: "Taking their cue from people’s actual behaviors rather than some idealized projection, a number of startups are designing tools that help people get what they want from group interaction." Shirky writes

Support for Group Interaction: Working with E-mail

All enterprises have more knowledge in their employees as a group than any one person, even (especially?) the CEO. The worst case is where one person has a problem and another knows a solution, but neither knows the other – or that the other knows. Despite e-mail’s advantages for communication, it falls down as a close collaboration tool on complex projects: E-mail makes it hard to keep everything related to a particular project in one place; e-mailed attachments can lead to version-control nightmares; and it’s almost impossible to get the Cc:line right. If the Cc:line is too broad, it creates “occupational spam” – messages from co-workers that don’t matter to everyone addressed. If the Cc:line is too narrow, the activity becomes opaque to management or partners.

Traction: Weblogs grow up

...Traction attempts to utilize the simplicity and ease of use of blogging software to publish and annotate content, while allowing better control of security and access than standard blogging tools. The tool lets employees report their efforts and observations in a weblog. Other interested parties (and, in the case of sensitive material, only those parties) can then have access to that material in one place and on-demand, rather than piecing things together from a dozen Cc:ed e-mails.

The front page of a Traction blog is the same as any weblog: recent posts of relevant material, listed by group, in reverse chronological order. These posts can be links to external material (“Check out this interesting Forbes article on one of our clients”), internal material (“Here’s our current marketing deck. Comments?”) or pure commentary (“I posted my thoughts on our current product mix”).Traction allows the creation of a far more complex mix of posts than the average weblog tool, however, by cross-referencing posts by groups and user-defined labels. Every user of the system is a member of one or more groups: A user could be a member of the Sales group, the Directors’ group, and the Chicago office group. Both individuals and groups have a set of permissions relative to other individuals and groups. Someone n the Sales group might be able to post in the Sales weblog, to append comments or questions to existing posts in the Product group’s weblog, and to read the CFO’s weblog, but might not have permission even to read the Board group’s weblog. (Users can ask to be notified of updates by e-mail so they don’t have to be in constant scanning mode.)...

Lloyd says, “Everyone asks how we can manage a mix of material sorted by importance, area of focus and time, as if this is an unsolvable problem. But newspapers solve it every day, by accepting that there is no one answer, and by making up a new front page every day. In groups, coherence comes from shared labels: We all agree how something should be characterized, so the solution doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful. Given the volume of material in the average newspaper, which readers are perfectly capable of navigating through, we think this is a solvable problem.” ...

Traction overcomes the risk that if employees feel they are being forced to say everything out in the open, they may say nothing at all (or they’ll restrict their comments to the “Ooooh, Ms. CEO, you are so smart! Can I please have a raise?” variety). Traction’s answer to this problem is to allow groups some freedom in creating Traction spaces: “Each project space has its own team and its own audience. Project spaces can be opened up to a wider group of peers or senior management, or kept private, as the project group wants.” Lloyd uses Traction’s own customer relations operations as an example: “We create one project area for each customer, visible only to that customer and us, as well as one group project for all the customers. When we have a new announcement – an updated SDK, say – we post it to the group project and everyone sees it. But if one of those customers wants to talk to us about helping them implement it, that conversation happens in our separate shared project, away from the other customers.

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