In prepping for the Highlands Group meeting of 3 April 2003, I read Clay Shirky's Social Software paper, and had to think about where Traction fits in his spectrum - email, IM, Groove, weblogs and Wikis. Clay pointed out that all social software is for groups, but not all groups have a goal, and something clicked. Please read this note for background. See grl2008: Social Software: Groups with a Goal Slides (Highlands, 3 April 2003) for the slides.
Background
I met Clay Shirky (www.shirky.com) through an introduction from Joe Addiego. Joe, Gilman, and Jeremy Allaire talked with Clay and Dick O'Neill at PC Forum 2003, and encouraged them to invite TSI to a Highlands Group meeting meeting on Social Software the following week (Marketing1090, www.HighlandsGroup.net).
Clay's paper, Social Software and the Politics of Groups seemed to be written with Traction in mind. He asks:
"If a group has a goal, how can we understand the way the software supports that goal? This is a complicated question, not least because the conditions that foster good group work, such as clear decision- making process, may well upset some of the individual participants. Most of our methods for soliciting user feedback assume, usually implicitly, that the individual's reaction to the software is the critical factor. This tilts software and interface design towards single-user assumptions, even when the software's most important user is a group." from http://shirky.com/writings/group_politics.html
The purpose of the meeting was to expose high level Department of Defense people to a broad range of 'social software': Blogs, Wikis, Groove (represented by Ray Ozzie) - and Enterprise Weblogs (represented by yours truly) (Marketing1109)
Groups with a Goal
I jumped on Clay's term 'Groups with a goal', thinking of a business team engaged in a goal directed activity - sales, product development, management, competitive intelligence. Goal directed behavior has driven Doug Engelbarts' life-long focus on enabling people to work as high performance teams. (grl1427)
But not all groups have (or need to have) a goal. Groups can form to debate, ponder, socialize, or pass the time pleasantly (not necessarily calmly).
I said - with tongue in cheek: "Enterprise weblogs are for groups with a goal - Weblogs are for individuals with an attitude!" And defended the position after the laughter stopped.
Traditional weblogs form a chorus of voices. Goals and topics (where present) are intertwingled through many parallel conversations. Personal weblogs are organized by speaker (weblog), then by time, with interleaved public conversations that flow from topic to topic across weblogs, reading like a stream of consciousness.
An enterprise weblog (Traction) creates time ordered conversations within one or more shared spaces in which many individuals aggregate information and create conversations with the space. It is organized by space, then by time, with articles and comments attributed to specific speakers. The time order within the space forms a stream of conversation that generally lines up along the purpose of the space, through social pressure within the group - or an editorial hand.
Traction's standard presentation metaphor is a web newspaper which presents information simultaneously organized by importance (headline, news or routine items), topic (space and sub-topic), and time. This permits people to read based on their interests and priorities, with confidence that material they don't read immediately is archived for later review or search.
Traction's permission model permits one individual to address any chosen audience by selecting a space (project) in which to write a new article. An individual can comment on an article in the same or different space, extended over time.
This adds another dimension of conversation:
More private: I add a comment on a Marketing project article in my private notebook - making the inline comment visible only to me and people who I allow to read my notebook, or
More public I find an article in my personal project that I wish to promote to a more public space - by adding a comment and a label from a more public project (making that article visible to a wider audience).
For some individuals, conversation in a more public space is inhibiting, for others, it provide more motivation. You'd speak differently to a group you know and trust than to a group of strangers - or everyone on the Web. In every case that I can imagine, the choice of group you choose to speak to introduces an important social dimension.
It's not a continuum (not even a partial order) - each space has its own audience, creating many parallel side conversations when you look at time slices across all spaces simultaneously (as Traction does).
For example, Traction Software Inc (TSI)'s Traction server has Marketing, Sales, Engineering, PR, SDK and other projects (spaces) visible to all TSI employees. Selected projects are visible to TSI's PR firm and advisors. The Customer project is visible to all TSI customers as well as the extended TSI team. The SDK project is visible to customers who are OEM or VAR partners. A conversation in the SDK project would be visible to all partners as well as the TSI team.
Each OEM or VAR partner has individual login accounts and a project (call them CompanyA, CompanyB, CompanyC, ...) used to share plans and conversations privately between that partner and the TSI team.
For example, a sales person in CompanyA can post a question in CompanyA's project, and know that it's visible to Traction Software employees, but not competitors who may also be TSI partners.
Members of the Traction product team can add comments and discuss the question, selectively including CompanyA in the conversation. After agreement is reached, the answer - and any part of the previously private conversation, edited as appropriate - can be made visible to all partners after the fact by adding a label such as FAQ from the SDK project.
Traction's built-in search engine is sensitive to permissions, so that you'll see articles and content hits in just the articles and comments you're permitted to read. When an older article or comment is made more public, a wider audience will start seeing that article and its content hits immediately. If the more public label is removed, the article will immediately become less visible.
Places versus Spaces
It reminded me of an excellent paper by Harrison and Dourish which argues that software designers should distinguish between social places and physical spaces:
We argued that features of space have been exploited by system developers in the attempt to regain the sense of appropriate behavioral framing which we observe and encounter in the real world. However, in everyday action, this appropriate behavioral framing comes not from a sense of space, but from a sense of place. Our key principle describes the relationship between the two: Space is the opportunity: place is the understood reality. ...
Physically, a place is a space which is invested with understandings of behavioral appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth. We are located in "space", but we act in "place". Furthermore, "places" are spaces that are valued. The distinction is rather like that between a "house" and a "home"; a house might keep out the wind and the rain, but a home is where we live.
A conference hall and a theatre share many similar spatial features (such as lighting and orientation); and yet we rarely sing or dance when presenting conference papers, and to do so would be regarded as at least slightly odd (or would need to be explained). We wouldn't describe this behavior as "out of space"; but it would most certainly be "out of place"; and this feeling is so strong that we might try quite hard to interpret a song or a dance as part of a presentation, if faced with it suddenly. It is a sense of place, not space, which makes it appropriate to dance at a Grateful Dead concert, but not at a Cambridge college high table; to be naked in the bedroom, but not in the street; and to sit at our windows, peering out, rather than at other people's windows, peering in. Place, not space, frames appropriate behavior.
Conversely, the same location -- with no changes in its spatial organization or layout -- may function as different places at different times. An office might act, at different times, as a place for contemplation, meetings, intimate conversation and sleep. So a place may be more specific than a space. A space is always what it is, but a place is how it's used. - Traction220
The fact that the Traction interface presents each individual with a time sliced view of the union activity across all of the spaces that person has rights to see (or a subset of interest), creates a richer dialog, including private notes as well as many simultaneous side conversations.
It's easy for a single Traction server to model a family of independent weblogs that are the voices of many individuals (i.e. create one project per weblog, each with Visitor access, and one primary author). It's difficult to see how the content of constellations of independent weblogs can be intertwingled to model the permissioned places that are natural and efficient if you start with a group oriented model like Traction's.
I was delighted to find that John Seely Brown was in the Highlands group meeting - and said "Two of seven papers in the reference list ties you and Doug Engelbart - you can't get much higher praise from me!" We had a good conversation later at dinner.
