Wave on Business

On November 11 Daniel Graversen was giving a presentation to Prosa, the union of It-professionals. The topic on Google Wave was of interest to many and the event was sold out. There was suppose to be around 49 people.  The presentation lasted 1 hour and 40 minutes. There was a lot of questions from the audience, making the event very open discussion.

The main topics which was covered was

• Google Wave ( would be strange if we did not cover it)
• Groups, and we had a debate on the topic. This included search and the public timeline
• Enterprise use and the Novell client.
• We had some user experiences of Google Wave, and how it was used to collective take notes at IT-University. We hope to be able to cover this topic more in detail at a later stage.

The slides from the presentation is bellow.

If you need a presentation on Google Wave for our company or organization send a mail to dgr@WaveOnBusiness.com or Wave to dgraversen@googlewave.com, and we can arrange a presentation.

This is a follow-up post to our blog last week about an experiment at a publishing company, which took place on Friday, the 13th of November.

After a brief introduction to the agenda, went through the basics of Wave in about half an hour.

This proved to be challenging, because there is after all so much to show in Wave by now, but we focused on basic usage on Wave and scoped the presentation for this.

The best way to present Wave is clearly to introduce a few concepts and then jump right into demo’s. I’ve done live Wave demo’s a number of times now, and it always helps to have a helping hand in the audience, who also is familiar with Wave and can participate in the demonstration.

Wave had a good day – DESPITE the fact, that this was done on Friday, the 13th – although there were minor sync problems with the Wave servers.

After the introduction the participants we’re asked to go through some basic exercises to get accustomed to the Wave interface and got their contacts set up.

The participants of the experiment had no previous knowledge of using Wave, apart from signing up for an account.

The participants previous experience with online collaboration had mostly been with emails, Google Docs and Sites, Skype and to a lesser extent, with chat tools.

They quickly got the feel of Wave and started chatting, using keyboard shortcuts and trying out private replies.

One of the users who had not used chat very much, said that Wave felt very convincing to use.

Experiments

After a short time of training the three users were thrown into the experiments.

During the first, a project initiator had to open a new wave and start a brainstorm on an idea for a new book with the users sitting away from each other in the room to simulate that the users were actually in different rooms.

The students and I were monitoring the discussion, and one of the students would give instructions to the users in a separate wave, termed the “command wave”, to guide the experiment in a certain direction.

The experiment worked out pretty well, and an idea for a new book was actually taking form as an added bonus

During this first experiment the communication was pretty chaotic with structure and contents mixed together in a pretty mess.

Also, there was no agreed way to form the communication – mostly replies would be used, but sometimes inline replies took place as well.

The evaluation of the first experiment got the following feedback from the users:

- structure is something that is made up along the way, using lists for instance (numbered lists were lacking according to the users)

- communication was constantly changing between creating structure and discussing contents

- the collaborative part in editing was very good.

- private replies proved valuable for on-the-side chatting (mostly one-on-one fact based discussions, not private chat)

- the chat in private replies, was usually done using other tools (Skype/IM) and the users liked the fact that they could stay in Wave and have support for private chat contained herein

- it’s difficult to see where the action in a wave is currently taking place. When you’re in a long wave and somebody is typing at the top, you have to scroll around to catch the activities going on.

When asked what the initiator would have done differently, he replied that he would have aimed for more structure to begin with.

And very interestingly, he also expressed that he felt like he was supposed to be organizing a real meeting in Wave and therefore aimed to keep some sort of meeting order, which was hard.

Organizing a wave brainstorm is a different proces than a physical meeting and therefore requires a different mindset – this was clear to the organizer during the first experiment.

In conclusion…

The experiments showed some progress in the ability to structure the communication and form the output of the brainstorm as well.

Overall the users enjoyed using Wave and saw a good potential for using Wave in their working process.

And who knows, maybe a new book will come out at some point as the result of these experiements

On Thursday Daniel Graversen gave a presentation on Google Wave at Dongenergy, one of the largest companies in Denmark. The presentation was given as part of a SOA workshop, and Wave was introduced as a place where SOA could be leveraged.

The presentation was only on 15 minuttes, so there was not a lot of time to go into all the details, only the basics of Wave was covered:

• Wave editing and chat demonstration
• How the Gravity client works and real time editing of the Wave.
• SAP customer service robot which demostrates the use Wave as a Enterprise Service client.

You can see the slides below.

The most interesting was a 1 hour workshop, where we discussed how Wave could be used in organizations the size of Dong Energy. The result of this discussion will be posted in a future blog post.

If you need a presentation on Google Wave for our company or organization send a mail to dgr@WaveOnBusiness.com or Wave to dgraversen@googlewave.com, and we can arrange a presentation.

Testing new technology like Wave is never easy. It requires a structured approach, so you can compare the usage of Wave with the usage of existing tools.

I’m not sure how often this is the case when making decisions for purchasing new software. Sometimes software is chosen based solely on a attractive Return on Investement (ROI) and then you choose it.

Some students from Aalborg University are going to have a session with a company, where they will experimenting with how wave can be used in a real life working situation.
It’s on Friday the 13th, so we hope everything will go according to the plan, without any scary problems

We are looking forward to the results of this experiment, and hope to share the findings with you.

The company in question is a publishing company, who are already used to using Google Apps for their internal and external collaboration. This means they are used to having online tools for collaborating like Google Docs.

The experiment will take a full day. There will first be an introduction to Wave by Tommy Dejbjerg Pedersen, so all participants know about the basics of wave. Then there will be three sessions with different experiments outlined below. Each session will last for an hour with an evaluation at end, to get some feedback.

First round

Can Wave be used to create prepare an idea. An author will contact the publisher and see if they can co-create an idea for the new book.

Second Round

Planning the book contents – what needs to be in the book ? Any specific themes, who will write it and so on.

The participants need to come up with a project plan for how the book can be created.

Third round

Can Wave be used to structure the content of the book.

Try to create the index, and create a draft of the structure of all the chapters.

Evaluations

During all the experiments the students, will try to poke and introduce new technologies and collaboration forms to see how the participants adopts them. After the day will the participants will be interviewed so the students can capture the experiences after the sessions and the participants view on Wave.

We are not sure how the much the employees have used Wave before the session, it will be most fun if they are mostly new to Wave.

If you have any ideas for how to help get better results of the experiment, please drop a comment, then it could be incorporated to the scenario.

Especially if there are any tools or ways to work, that the students should introduce into the experiment.

Image by *maya*

After I have been writing some waves together with different groups of people, I find Wave to be a good collaboration tool, which is really easy to brainstorm on ideas or write different documents in.

A single wave can have multiply wavelets, where separate discussions can take place. Comments can be places inside other comments and create large nested structures.

Wave containing two separate wavelets

If you have a large document, with a lots of comments in it, it’s pretty hard to get a clear view of the contents of the document.

The document is perhaps too big and the large amount of comments hide the true core contents of the wave.

The playback option in Wave is a really great way to show the steps leading to the creation of this document and see when and where the comments were made.

Still, for large documents, it’s difficult to get a good grasp of the document even by watching the entire playback.

With the current Wave client it is only possible to hide inline comments. Inline comments are comments created inside a blip by marking a part of the text. These kind of comments can be collapsed so they take up less space on the screen, But comments written over the rest of the document is more difficult to remove.

A cut-out from a complex wave

The solution to get a “clean” document is to refactor it.

Refactoring is a concept widely used in the programming industry and it simply means to change the code into something easier to understand either by restructuring code, adding code or in other ways make changes that makes reading and understanding the code easier.

The idea is to refactor the document. Refactoring is soemthing which comes from programming and mean that the code is changed into something easier to understand and simpler. When you refactor you have more knowledge of the end product, so you are able to do a better job, the first time you write.

The same is true for waves. You do not know the outcome of a Wave, and if you did, you would just choose to send an email instead. Therefore collaboration with Wave is a learning process, where you are bound to fail a few times before getting it right.

If your waves become to complex you should also refactor them. When you refactor the document you should write the conclusions of the comments into the main document. This way the data is distilled to the core essence. Then you can delete the comments, because they just provide an outlet for a discussion, which is now completed.

Remember:  It’s always possible to use the playback funtion to go back and find out what lead to a specific conclusion.

In the near future, there will hopefully be some tools available to make the refactoring process much easier – so look out for more tools to make your Wave experience even better than now !

Wednesday, October 8th Daniel Graversen gave a presentation at Bibliotekarforbundet (The Librarian union). The topic was on technologies of tomorrow, where Google Wave is a clear candidate.

The presentation lasted around an hour with a lots of questions during the presentation. It was interesting to speak to group of people who was into knowledge and they all had ideas on how Wave could be used to help them in their work. Some talked about the job of organizing the waves into something easier to find.

The slides from the presentation are available below. Some slides are in Danish, but when we create new slides they will be done in English.

Another speaker at this event was Martin von Haller Groenbaek who talked about open source and creative comments. Really inspiring and made me think about adding creative commons to my work.

In todays world, organizations are becoming more and more dependent on collaboration with external partners.
Organizations are now by nature globally minded, and are actively working across the globe with knowledge workers in terms of outsourcing or simply collaborating with experts that are not available in-house or in the local region of the company.

The need for participation in many processes is rising and the tools used to facilitate participation need to fit the purpose well, if collaboration must be successful.
The first step is for the organization to actually realize the need to support collaboration and perceive it as being a good idea. When the organization has accepted that it needs to collaborate, it will act more dynamically and much faster than before, because of the power of tapping the resources of outside people and teams.

Finding the right tool for the collaborative process is the next crucial step. If the organization fails to adapt the tools because the tools don’t fit the purpose, the collaborative process will become a source of frustration and thus collaboration will be ruled out as a means of getting things done.

We believe Wave fits the task of collaborating with both internal and external collaborators at the same time very nicely.
But what are the other options for collaboration with todays technology and how well do they fit the purpose?

Lets take a look at a specific scenario where a team needs to agree on a document for a sales presentation and walk through the process of applying different means of communication.

Emails. Can be sent to all participants. They can then reply to the sender, some of the participants or all of them, with their comments. If many people are involved it will be a complex task to make sure that they only comment on the newest version.Long email threads are also hard to follow – especially if you are not included in the communication from the beginning.

If the team decides to use a document attached to the email it will just become more difficult to manage. Moreover, if change tracking is used within the Word document this adds another layer of versioning complexity and eventually the email participants will give up on keeping track of changes.

Newsgroups or forums can also be used. By using newsgroups is it possible to have threaded conversation, and people can comment on each others additions or corrections to the presenation. It will still be difficult find the most current version, and see who had made which correction. Forums are “just” webenabled newgroups, they might have some extra features but the concept is still the same.

Physical meetings are a great place to work together on a project and for agreeing on a subject.
The social aspect of meeting physically really enhances the collaborative effort and eliminates many pitfalls in the communication.
It will be difficult for the team to work on the document at the same time, and it is not possible to work on creating a large document collectively.
Meeting minutes are important for capturing the thoughts and the details of the meeting process, but they are often not sent right after the meeting is over, so people don’t know which tasks they have been assigned before the minutes arrive some time after the meeting.
Also, getting people to actually meet for a physical meeting can be very hard – especially in large organizations.

Online meetings are like physical meetings. You just don’t have the socializing and transport. Instead you might have sound problems, with people having bad microphones. You still cannot write on the same document. Using Wikis people can collaborate on creating a document. In a multiorganizational environment, a hosted or external facing wiki should be used. The problem is when you are collaborating in different pages, you need to subscribe to the changes via RSS, this might be dificult for non savy ID users. And how do you ensure that the team only see the one page they are working on.

Teleconferences can be used, but people won’t have the ability to see the document. Instant messaging or IRC will not work. The team will just creating a lot of seperate comments, which should be integrated into the document. If they have a busy chat it could be difficult to see what they are commenting on.

Wave as the ideal tool for collaboration

Why is Wave better suited for this purpose then?

One person starts the discussion and adds the participants he/she wants to add. Participants can then edit the document at the same time and add and change content – they can also make comments to whole paragraphs or just sub paragraphs with inline replies. It is possible to have discussions about certain passages of the document, which could then be concluded with a change in the original document. Afterward the discussions are easily removed, but during the creation of the document, every participant can see the relevant comments right next to the information the comments belong to.

New Waves can be spun off if needed, thus creating copies of some content in a Wave elsewhere to work on separately. It is also possible to have the private conversations, which will allow users to discuss isolated areas without involving all the participants. So two technicians could discuss some technical matters without involving the sales people participating as well, this could reduce the noise ration in the communication.

When a document is finished in Wave it could be exported to another format such as PDF using the extension features of Wave – this creates a snapshot of the document for external use, but the information used to create the document stays in Wave along with the comments and versioning information.

This blog entry was written using Google Wave with two authors situated in different parts of the country, collaborating on the task of writing, spell checking and commenting about the contents. This could have been done in this blog (WordpPress) directly, but we would then switch between working on the contents, saving drafts and revising these in turns.

Instead we chose the Wave way where we could simultaneously edit the content, comment on it and – at the end – simply copy the contents to the blog for layout and publishing.

Update:

Others are looking at similar use cases:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/09/google-wave-collaborative-journalism.html