Wave on Business

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 !