The Community Development Society is hosting its 38th Annual International Conference
COMMUNITIES THAT CLICK: Individuals, Families, and Organizations Working Together

– June 25-28, 2006 –
St. Louis, Missouri, USA at the Sheraton St. Louis Hotel

Join us on Sunday and take in the professional development Pre-Conference
Workshops:
Social Impact Assessment (SIA) for Community Development Professionals
Ways to See Communities from a New Perspective
New Approach to Community Revitalization – Mobilizing Citizens to Take Charge of their Future

Plus all the offerings of the full conference agenda!
Highlights of this year’s event include…
* Over 60 paper and project presentations
* Intensive learning workshops
* Various keynote speakers and plenary sessions
* 18 diverse conference tracks and topics of interest
* Nine offsite mobile learning workshops
* Much, Much More

REGISTER NOW!! A full schedule of events and registration form are posted
on the Community Development Society Web Site.
www.comm-dev.org

Furumo, Kimberly A., Ph.D., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 2005, 190 pages; AAT 3195311

her dissertation is entitled:
The impact of personality, task and technology on perceived team interaction and performance in virtual teams

flames happen. but can putting ‘everyone needs a hug’ into the comments field, reduce the amount of flames? seems it can. particletree did so & claims their rate of flaming has decreased.

there’s an article on informit concerning ‘team applications’. the article reviews 5 web based applications which can be used for team collaboration.

the theme of all 5 applications is ‘keep it simple’ (starting with basecamp who uses it as a mantra but it’s echoed with the other 4: rallypoint, remember the milk, central desktop and calendarhub). Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals, believes people need ‘just enough’ to get the work done, not a long list of features.

while i agree with that statement, ‘just enough’ is going to vary depending on the teams. these 5 applications give users to-do lists, calendars, document sharing, RSS, shared communication areas. but a very simple application virtual teams need, that none offer, is a time zone converter/meeting planner. it also feels like these applications need to fit together so you can integrate and pick and choose. wouldn’t it be great if they all offered APIs which allowed you to use the remember the milk list with the central desktop system for example. perhaps widgets are the way collaborative software needs to move.

following on from their post re: the good in email (see my post for the link & my commentary), the folks at central desktop have now written about what is bad with email. their list:

- it’s silo’ed (ie it sits in your inbox, it doesn’t get shared, search isn’t very good)
- it creates walled gardens (ie you post to a group but yet you get an email back to just you when the entire group would have benefited from the comment)
- email isn’t secure
- group email is a pain to administer
- it’s horrible for document management
- spam & a lack of fantastic spam filters
- it’s hard to convey importance & priority
- virus spreading
- inconsistencies of handling html email, rich text, attachments, MIME, etc.
- it’s not permission based
- it makes us lazy

i think they’ve got a good list although i’m not sure i would have put permission based, lazy & the administration issues in my list.

i’m in a situation currently where email is used as the primary mode of communication for working on projects. i know there’s been no task/technology discussion. while i would expect some of the folks to be knowledgeable enough to realise email isn’t the way to go… i think it’s a comfort zone issue. at present there’s no ability to setup a secure workspace area like a wiki (there’s not even a bug tracking system for goodness sake!!) so i’m going to try to ween them over to basecamp (shame u don’t get file sharing on the free version). should be an interesting experiment and i’m looking forward to it!