Who's interested in project management & collaboration tools? And...

[Miles Fidelman]

.... where are they and how do I get their attention?

Hi Folks,

A lot of folks here are involved in using/developing technology to
support various forms of networked collaboration, with particular
leanings toward open, decentralized approaches. So I wonder if I might
solicit opinions on the following.....

I've been working on some open source software to support virtual teams
and projects - putting some of the experiences and techniques I've
acquired over the years into code - and I'm trying to gather some
support via Kickstarter.

The thing is, I'm having a very hard time getting people to even visit
the project's web page - so far, only about 300 people have visited the
Kickstarter page, despite some serious attempts to spread the word
across various email lists, twitter, and so forth.

It's one thing if people were looking at the page and not contributing,
but I can't even seem to get people's attention - which suggestions one
or more of four things:

- nobody cares about project management (I hope this isn't the case - I
know administrivia isn't sexy, but an awful lot of people are working on
an awful lot of projects, and getting buried in mountains of paper,
email, phone calls, texts, meetings, and yellow stickies. I sure know
that I'm always looking for ways to declutter that side of my life)

- I'm not reaching people who care.

- I'm reaching people, but not getting their attention.

- I'm reaching people, getting their attention, but not providing enough
motivation to go the next step and click their mouse (on

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th


So... I'd really welcome any feedback on the questions who cares about
project management & collaboration tools, how to reach them, and what
might motivate them enough to take a look at what I'm doing?

Thanks very much,

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra

[Daniel Baird]

I would guess that you need to be clearer about what, precisely, you're proposing to build or deliver if you get your kickstarter funding.

For someone to click through to your kickstarter page (let alone volunteer money when they get there..), they have to be thinking, "Hmm, that sounds like something I might like!".

In this post you've referred to your thing as "software to support virtual teams and projects", which is about what I vaguely remember from your first announcement on this list, and doesn't convince me to spend the ten seconds to follow your link.  Maybe it's like Trello, maybe it's plugins for MSWord to 'show changes' in a better way, maybe it's a friendly version of IRC...

You can't reach people who don't care, but you can reach people who think "Meh, I'll do nothing, and just wait and see if anything comes out of it" and change their thoughts to "I can do this little thing to help make this happen".  I think specifics will help people to move from one to the other.

Good luck!

;Daniel

(open to job offers: dan...@danielbaird.com)

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Daniel Baird
I've tried going to the XHTML <bar /> a few times, but it's always closed.

[Miles Fidelman]

Hi Melvin,

>
>
> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th
>
>
> So... I'd really welcome any feedback on the questions who cares about
> project management & collaboration tools, how to reach them, and what
> might motivate them enough to take a look at what I'm doing?
>
>

> Have you seen bettermeans?
>
> www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlnMWlvw9g
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlnMWlvw9g>
>

Have now, and in a sense it's the exact opposite of I'm working on - it
imposes its view of how to manage collaboration, and it's a centralized
system.

Most of the feedback I'm getting has been telling me that I need to to a
better job of differentiating what I'm doing from the mass of project
management products and services, so...

1. Simplicity: The model is more about keeping everyone on the same page
(like actors following the same script) than about lots of process. In
the case of project management, a script looks more like a list of
action items - hence the reason that an awful lot of project managers
end up simply keeping track of things in spreadsheets. The trick is how
to share the same "script" across the net.

2. Distributed and Peer-to-Peer: If you're happy with sharing a
GoogleDocs spreadsheet, this project isn't for you. If you like linked
spreadsheets, but wished they actually worked across the net, and used
open formats and protocols - that's what I'm shooting for. Write an
action item list in a spreadsheet-like format, email it to
collaborators, then as folks update things, those updates propagate
automagically - no sorting through tons of emails to extract updates.
(Also allow more wiki-like things, for Q&A, background materials, etc. -
again, distributed rather than all running on a central machine).

3. Open everything.

[Miles Fidelman]

Daniel Baird wrote:
>
> I would guess that you need to be clearer about what, precisely,
> you're proposing to build or deliver if you get your kickstarter funding.
>
> For someone to click through to your kickstarter page (let alone
> volunteer money when they get there..), they have to be thinking,
> "Hmm, that sounds like something I might like!".
>
> In this post you've referred to your thing as "software to support
> virtual teams and projects", which is about what I vaguely remember
> from your first announcement on this list, and doesn't convince me to
> spend the ten seconds to follow your link. Maybe it's like Trello,
> maybe it's plugins for MSWord to 'show changes' in a better way, maybe
> it's a friendly version of IRC...
>

Daniel, Thanks! I'm really starting to get that message.

Actually easier to do in the tiddlywiki community - since what I'm
thinking of is essentially:

- TiddlyWiki model (local copy of a project plan, as a single-file app.
running in a browser)

- An interface that's more attuned to project management (checklist,
action item list, expandable fields for details, Q&A, other info
associated with each checklist)

- Linked via a P2P protocol - update a local copy, updates propagate
automatically to other copies of the document

Work flow comes down to:
1. Generate an initial "checklist" in a browser
2. Email to collaborators.
3. Updates flow automagically rather than having 100s of follow-up
emails show up that have to be sorted through and reconciled.

Does this start to do a better job of telling the story? (I do hope to
have some demo code in a week or two.)

Miles

[Miles Fidelman]

Jay Sulzberger wrote:
>
>>>
>>> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th
>>>
>>>
>
> Perhaps just limited encrypted Usenet?

Funny you should mention that. NNTP is, to my mind, the world's
greatest messaging protocol. Back in the day, Netscape built a
"collaboration server" that added access controls and some management
functions to an NNTP server - it was an incredibly powerful tool.

In some sense, the model sitting in the back of my mind, is:
- NNTP (with encryption and crypto-based access controls)
- easier management of (private) group creation
- messages containing HTML & JavaScript that can do some embedded
threading (think about sending a Wiki page, the initial page shows up as
a news message, edits are automatically applied rather than showing up
as separate messages)

>
> Also perhaps:
>
> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own
>
> with a daemon that labels files, presents histories, and such like.
>
>
Yes... saw that a while back - does look really interesting.

Miles

[andrew.j.harrison84]

I think it will be possible with tw5 when it is ready.

[Poul]

It sounds to me like you need investors. Won't investos think: If it's open source, and it's P2P, then where the hell is the business model?

/Poul

[Alex Hough]

I am interested in these kind of tools and developed an
'organisational maturity model' based on the viable system model (VSM)
using TW for an organisation interested in organisation I belong to.
I designed the tool with the idea that that the model could be
integrated into individual and team wikis. The teams would be able to
work in a non-heirachical viable and sustainable way!!! whoop!

I think a problem is that tools such as these need a lot of user input
to make them work for the organisation using them.

I think Poul has a good point about investors and open source. With
Daniel contributing to the thread, it makes me think that what you are
talking about is GTD for groups.

The TW community is a good place to share ideas about this kind of
thing - there is great expertise and many folks are thinking about how
to organise things better right now. I am very confident in TW world
and although I don't understand it fully i think that TW and TW5 have
the 'quality that has no name' -

To answer your questions
- I'd be more interested if the business model had more TiddlyWikiness in it.
- its difficult to see the "what's in it for me aspect" of the project




Alex

On 5 August 2012 16:09, Poul <poul.st...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It sounds to me like you need investors. Won't investos think: If it's open source, and it's P2P, then where the hell is the business model?
>
> /Poul
>

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[Miles Fidelman]

Thanks to all who've sent me comments!

The new, and hopefully improved Kickstarter page and video are now up at:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th

Take a look! Comments welcome. So are donations, likes, tweets, diggs,
+1s, re-distribution, blog posts, and any other visibility! And... if
you happen to have a large, distributed project coming up - a
conference, event, crowd sourcing effort, flash performance, disaster
response exercise that just begs for a collaboration support tool -
let's talk!

Best,

Miles

[Miles Fidelman]

That's the intent:

- Initial document distribution will be by email, so PEM for distribution.

- Peer-to-Peer communication between documents will be over an encrypted
channel

-- model is a publish-subscribe "channel" per set of linked documents
with a channel key (perhaps several keys with different privileges)
-- channel key will be generated and distributed as part of initial
document distribution
-- still thinking through the threat model and responses (e.g., if a
single copy of a document is compromised, there goes the channel)

The early prototypes will probably NOT be encrypted, but will have hooks
in the design.

Miles


Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> Will this be end-to-end encrypted?
>
> -Jonathan
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Miles Fidelman <mfid...@meetinghouse.net>
> *To:* The Next Net
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> <liberat...@lists.stanford.edu>;
> freedombo...@lists.alioth.debian.org;
> tiddl...@googlegroups.com; theory and practice of decentralized
> computer networks <p2p-h...@lists.zooko.com>; web...@librelist.com
> *Cc:* unho...@googlegroups.com
> *Sent:* Friday, August 10, 2012 5:10 PM
> *Subject:* [Freedombox-discuss] Update: Who's interested in
> project management & collaboration tools?

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[Daniel Baird]

[…] what I'm thinking of is essentially:

- TiddlyWiki model (local copy of a project plan, as a single-file app. running in a browser)

- An interface that's more attuned to project management (checklist, action item list, expandable fields for details, Q&A, other info associated with each checklist)

- Linked via a P2P protocol - update a local copy, updates propagate automatically to other copies of the document

Work flow comes down to:
1. Generate an initial "checklist" in a browser
2. Email to collaborators.
3. Updates flow automagically rather than having 100s of follow-up emails show up that have to be sorted through and reconciled.

 

I'm interested in this (and as I'm home today looking after my sick kids, I have some time to reflect on it :)). In this situation, where you're trying to tie together multiple contributors, the success of the thing I think will boil down to how well it fits with each person's work flow. That's what will change it from a reporting obligation  to a useful working tool.

That's interesting because people working on the same thing can still have very different conceptions of it.  For one person, week long sub-project A is the final expression of their last two months of work on a feature; for another, project A might be the middle of their six month UI revision project.

My guess is that the difference will be in the high level data model — or perhaps 'object' model — that's imposed on the users.

Having nothing imposed (which I guess would just be simple checklists, and plain wiki content) means people will want to define their own structures. That could work, if the project-runner sets up a good clear structure that suits the project, but might end up with each person defining their own preferred (and incompatible) structures.

Having a rigid, more detailed structure imposed by the tool might suit person 1 but not work for person 2, or worse, not really suit anyone.

So my first naive thoughts are that the big challenge is to distil out the right set of common elements across all projects, carefully name them so people use them the right way*, and implement support for those project elements so that each contributor can use it the way they need to get their job done.

(* I always care a lot about the names of things, perhaps overly much.)

Anyway the point here is - for anyone who made it this far - I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with, with respect to the built-in structures.

;Daniel

[HansWobbe]

Reading parts of Daniel's response caused me wonder if there aren't parallels between some of the structural aspects of naming Tasks (or Activities) and defining them, and the way plugin developers have agreed to use standard, defined Slices to provide a consistent user Documentation experience.  I also think that some of the work Eric has done with customized View templates, invoked by simply applying a defined Tag value could be useful in structuring a 'common' structure.  If these 'core' elements are implemented properly, then individual needs could be integrated relatively simply by taking advantage of Transclusion.

In effect, I think spending some time getting the initial "built in structures" right, would be a good investment.

Finally, I really like the idea of distributed sub-plans that could be integrated via p2p technologies.  Alternatively ( at the very least ), it would be good to use ReeFeed items to automatically collect 'updates', rather than always having to chase after them.

My experience with with Project Management in 'enterprise-class' organizations leads me to believe that it will be difficult to get the design of such a system right without quite a bit of evolutionary tinkering, so I would assume that this needs a fair bit of elapsed time, and the engagement, or at least advice, of several of the more proficient developers that are part of the TW community. 

Done correctly, it could be a rewarding project.  After all, Microsoft Project "seats" are purchased by the 100s in large organizations and, even discounted for volume, generally cost more than $500 each.