FLM

(Auto) Presence: increasing team and network (communication) efficiency

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about how (auto)presence could increase team and network communication. The post also has to include some video or audio. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

There must be many people like me who are annoyed by voice-mail and vacation responders. I mean, for example, the vacation responder, if the system knows that you are on holiday I don not want the mail to be sent anyway. And I only want to call you when you are able and willing to pick up the phone. ‘Auto presence’ is a concept that could help increasing team and network communication efficiency. The concept is quite easy: the system knows your presence and only forwards communication efforts to you when it is relevant. The benefits are obvious: no more voice-mail, out of office responders.

Awareness Systems

Actually, modern collaboration platforms, like Google Wave, already include a lot of the auto presence concept. But what I do not like about systems like these is that they are a closed silo. If there is some relevant Wave activity for me, then I do not get an (email) notification. I first have to enter the Wave system and only then am I submerged in all the Google greatness. If I log out, I am back in the cold vast universe of the Internet. Similar things could be said about social networks like e.g. Elgg, Ning and Facebook. Inside the system there is a multitude of possibilities to communicate. Outside the system you are left with the traditional communication channels.
It would be cool to have some system where you would pick up your phone / skype, enter my number and see something like the footage below, combined with a message that I am ready for a real time, real life call:

If I’d not be available, you would see something like this (note the availability change at around 0:25):

That might sound obvious or ridiculous but the truth is that most office workers have mobile phones, which they bring anywhere, including meetings. Having a system that knows that you are in a ‘don’t disturb’ area (meeting room, client office, toilet) versus a ‘disturb area’ (your working place) would be a first step in increasing real time communication efficiency.

There are constant developments in communication efficiency so some of the annoyances / inefficiencies are already in the past. Some recent examples from Google:

• reply by chat
• forgotten attachments
• See which messages were sent right to you (vs messages where you are CC’ed)
• Send SMS text messages right from Gmail
• Sign out remotely (if you forget to sign out of a public computer: independence of space!)

The nature of communication

To really understand the problem of inefficient team and network communication, I think it is useful to take a closer look at the nature of that communication. First of all there is synchronous versus asynchronous communication.

synchronous:

• telephone
• skype
• instant messaging
• IRC (though you could argue it could be filed under asynchronous as well)
• …

asynchronous:

• email
• blog posts
• microblogging (twitter, identica, yammer)
• …

Second, in communication there are symmetric versus asymmetric relations. Until the advent of Twitter, the asynchronous relations in communication we knew of were traditional print (including books, magazines, news papers but also posters, bulletin boards etc) and web 1.0. Web 2.0 made asymmetric relations possible but not commonplace. In Facebook or LinkedIn, for example, you connect to people with mutual consent (I send you a request, you approve it). Twitter was one of the first asymmetric communication platforms. You can follow anyone you want without their approval (set aside the Cro-Magnons protecting their tweets).

Apart from the technological solutions from the first half of this post I think there is  a wealth of opportunities and possibilities in asynchronous, asymmetric communication. The real solution to inefficient communication is not in curing symptoms (like the technical solutions above) but in changing the way we think about communication. The problem is we are still approaching tools like Twitter from our traditional communication paradigm. I strongly believe there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we think about communication. Such a shift would make the current problems in communication and network efficiency obsolete. Asynchronous, asymmetric tools like Twitter makes such a shift possible. Now we only have to do it!

I will write about that in another blog post: The Twitter iceberg; working towards a paradigm shift in online communication.

Note: it’s really strange recording and watching yourself writing a blog post