Last month, Inc Magazine announced they were going to leave their fancy office & become a virtual organisation.

At least for a month – for a test run. The April issue of the magazine will let us know how they went.

Along the way they’ve been talking to others who work virtually. I caught this video convo with Matt Mullenweg from Automattic /WordPress.

Matt talks about their distributed organisation & something he said just clicked with me. When asked about the problems with the communicating to his staff around the world he said that communication problems aren’t a problem. That they’re just something to be aware of. Everything has strength & weakness.

That immediately took me back to a conversation I had multiple times with a former boss. Our video conference system was bad (fuzzy video, hard to hear audio). Everyone was aware the system was bad but not many seemed aware of the small things that could make it better… making sure you were close to the microphone when speaking, making sure everyone had received the file electronically before the meeting, letting 1 person talk at a time so the microphone could pick up that 1 sound, etc. Often I pointed out small things like this could make the difference but I could tell it went into the too hard basket. *

Each communication tool has strengths & weaknesses. You just need to understand what those are & how to work with the weakness. It’s not a problem. FANTASTIC!

(*Actually, the more video meetings we had, the more some people adapted but there wasn’t ever a mindset change)

i haven’t been posting to this blog – work has been overwhelming but the project i’ve been working on for about 8 months finally went live this past week – so pulling out a few items i had socked away…

cisco & musion teamed up to create this holographic video conferencing. how insanely cool!!

i do a fair amt of work over the phone. while we have a video conference with one of our other offices – it’s not very good. the video doesn’t show body language very well but the biggest issue is the audio. wonder how these 300k systems sound?

more here:
http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/11/15/cisco_experimenting_with_an_on_1.php

and an article on other systems

a post (and experiment) on the underuse of online collaboration & conversation tools by dave pollard.

dave also has a fantastic decision tree to help you decide what technology you should use to communicate.

in the underuse article, dave asks the following questions, puts them on writely & asks for people to go there to edit/answer. he said he granted permission to 31 people but only 12 participated.

1. Why are conversation and collaboration tools so underused? Is my list of 7 reasons missing anything? Are any of the reasons predominant?
2. Is the answer making the tools better? If so, how? If not, what is the answer?
3. Given time, do you think people will eventually learn to use these tools, despite their shortcomings? Which tools, current or envisioned, will be the winners, the killer apps for online-enabled conversation and collaboration, and why?
4. What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better conversationalists, and how would we do this?
5. What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better collaborators, and how would we do this?

. personally i think tools are underused because people don’t know about them or are afraid of them or just don’t understand what the benefit could be. i think a lot of the tools could be better (and they will get better). i recently experimented with a wiki during a project at work. there were definite benefits to using it, there was resistance to using the technology, and even though i think the technology was pretty damned good, i saw definite places it could have been more user friendly .

i think several of the contributors to that post make very valid points re: generational differences. the usage of collaboration type items makes the newer generation not only more computer savvy but also willing to share (instead of the ‘i produced this’ mindset of other generations).

sulake, which owns habbo hotel has surveyed their members concerning their media usage. the study covered more than 42k teenaged members across 22 countries. it’s not surprising that 66% think tv is an important media, less than half think radio is, 54% on magazines & less than 40% think newspapers are important.

it’s also not surprising that 89% think the net is an important media but i did find it interesting that email & IM are the two most important services. of late there’s been a few items in the news about how IM and sites like myspace are the important communication services for youngsters. supposedly they feel email is the domain of old people (to be used for work or school or communicating with grandparents). this study shows a different side. i wonder if it’s the international vs (most likely) usa only folks surveyed.

we all know it is important to communicate clearly and the challenges which email (or other non f2f communication) bring to the table.

there’s new research (wired article here) that shows we have a 50/50 chance in figuring out the tone of emails although we think we have successfully ‘read’ an email correctly 90% of the time.

this would definitely be leading to conflict, confusion and mis-communication (among other things).

the results of this research provide evidence to what we probably already felt but what i find very interesting is this research was done with undergrad subjects – people who you would think would have a lot of experience with email as they have been using it and growing up on it for years. yet, they do not seem to understand tone any more than folks who may not have a lot of experience with email.

ref:
Egocentrism Over E-Mail : Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?. Kruger, Justin; Epley, Nicholas; Parker, Jason; Ng, Zhi-Wen; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 89(6) December 2005. pp. 925-936.

abstract:
Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.