在线协作方式对比

可以回想一下，在没有网络的时代里面，我们是如何在一起协同工作的？首先，大家需要一个能够呆在一起的区域（我们称其为”办公室”），协作成员彼此之间可 以方便交流，接下来就是交谈、会议、工作分配、办公文稿的撰写和传递，如果还涉及到异地的协作，那么电话、传真和信函也是不可避免的，只有这样大家的工作 才能够同步起来，信息可以对称的在协作成员之间传递，如果只有你一个人来完成所有的工作，那大可不必这样。在网络时代，我们已经很习惯使用 Email 来进行工作的协同，当然还有 IM（很多公司还当他是工作效率的杀手），现在的 Blog、Wiki、讨论组和各种形式的在线协作工具、空间正让我们的协作形式变得越来越丰富，只要你能够合理的使用他们。

和传统的办公室协作一样，在线协作更需要与合适的人在一起工作，这些关系到成员的技能水平、性格、知识、工作方式和融洽程度，我们也需要提供合适的环境、 工具、知识、培训和简易的方式能够让大家在一起工作。这些比面对面的实时协作更有挑战性，不过也更有价值，在线协作完全摆脱了物理空间和时间的限制，让集体智慧更加有效的组合。这种虚拟的协同方式成就了现在 OpenSource 的繁荣，成千上万的分布在世界各地的开发人员们通过 Wiki, SVN, Bugzilla, IRC 和 Mailing List 完成了像 Linux、Apache 和 Firefox 这样伟大的项目。37Signals 的 Jason Fried 说：”当你能够和任何人一起工作的时候，为什么还要将自己限制在周围的几个人里面。如果我仅仅只和在芝加哥的人一起工作，那么我永远都不可能与 David 一起共事。那么世界上也就不会有 Rails 了。” —— 37Signals 创始人 Jason Fried 的访谈

在线协作的形式

在讨论如何选择正确的协作工具之前，我们需要把在线协作的形式抽象一下。按照协作时间的期限，可以划分成三中形式：

• 会话式（Conversations）：你只需要与你的协作对象联系一次或少数几次，在短时间内完成讨论一个或一组特定的话题。
• 项目式（Projects）：你需要经常地与你的协作成员联系，直到所参与的项目完成。
• 联合式（Alliances）：你和你的协作成员为了某个主题内容无限期的在一起工作，里面会包含多个会话和项目，例如：Moziilla 组织 和 群智基金会 。

下面是一个常见在线协作工具的优缺点对照表：

工具和方式 优势 缺点 适合的协作形式 weblog 容易发布和评论；
内容能够被订阅和再发布 参与仅限于评论 会话式 wiki 任何人都可以贡献内容 学习难度大；
容易被修改破坏；
表现不够美观 项目式 / 联合式 whiteboard
（白板） 实时的；
任何人都可以贡献内容 内容只在会话期内存在；
会遇到防火墙问题 会话式 / 项目式 document-sharing
（文档共享） 可以是实时的；
任何人都可以贡献内容 注意力只集中在一个文档；
会遇到防火墙问题 会话式 / 项目式 IM/skype/phone/
videoconferencing 完全实时协作；
语音/视频内容；有速度感 内容只在会话期内存在 会话式 mindmaps
（思维图） 多人意见的表达 抓不住细节 项目式 discussion forums
（讨论组） 能够以话题的形式展开评论；
内容能够被订阅和再发布 在参与知识的关联性上有限制；
容易引发未受训练的行为；
话题难以被连续的讨论 会话式 community of practice/
interest spaces
（兴趣空间） 有组织性；
明确成员关系；
适合多人的协作工具 学习难度大；
形式上的限制会降低用户之间的亲密度和参与度 项目式 / 联合式 e-mail groups 有弹性的；
个人的；
容易使用 垃圾邮件和邮件过载；
难以导航和整理，缺少关联性 项目式 / 联合式 social networking
（社会网络） 适合大规模的成员；
是发现其他协作者的最好方式 事实上大家不会用一个社会网络来完成具体的协作工作的 发现协作者 in-person collaboration
（直接协作）
简单的；
实时的；
表现丰富的；
有弹性的 成本过高；消耗时间 如果时间和金钱允许的话，什么协作形式都可以的

面对面沟通的替代方式 — 会话式协作

会话式协作说通俗一点也就是对话，那种即时的面对面的交谈。大家会因为一个共同的兴趣、一个重要的想法或者是一个紧急的需要与帮助而发起一次对话。在商务活动中，我们会花费大量的时间在解决问题、讨论想法和寻求意见上面交谈，我们会快速的提出问题并解答问题，所有这些都在一个短暂的会话中完成。要高效的完成会话式协作，有两个关键点：

• 找到合适的人：如果大家在一个人员众多、组织结构复杂的大公司里面工作，“我应该找谁来讨论这个问题”会是一个最常见的现象（相信有些朋友会深有感触 的），把这个问题扩展到公司的外部，寻找到合适的客户、协作人员、支持人员，发现合式的协作对象，才能够进行有效的沟通，因为找对人才能做对事。所以我认 为能够帮助大家发现合适的协作对象的 Social Networks（例如国内的 Wealink），无论是组织内部的还是组织外部的，将会是在线协作的基础工具，因为它是建立协作关系的桥梁。
• 使用对的工具：在你找到合适的协作对象之后，如果你们能够亲近的直接交流，那最好不过了，你不用为选择什么样的远程沟通工具而烦恼。但现实并没有如此的美 好，即使在同一个办公楼，大家也总不能够一直面对面，因为物理空间的资源是有限的，所有的人不可能同时使用会议室。这时你有两个常见选择：IM 和电话。使用 IM （文本聊天）你能够表达的更清晰简洁，它很适合多任务，你可以同时与多个人对话；电话则可以帮助你更清楚的交待事情的前因后果。那么像 White-boarding（白板）和 Document-sharing（文档共享）这样更加复杂的实时协作工具，可以作为 IM 和电话的补充，加强对话的表达效果，前提是参与者们有能力来驾驭这些相对IM来说要复杂一些的协作工具。

让大家一起更有条理的工作 — 项目与联合式的协作

项目式的协作相对于会话式协作允许更多的人员参与，大家不必再同一时刻进入，所有的操作都是非同步的，这样就会有更大的协作时间跨度。就像普通的项目管理 那样，所有的项目都会有至少一个目标和完成时间，我们能够在项目里面分配任务、定义里程碑、跟踪完成进度，这些是一个项目的基本要素，现在大多数的在线项目协作服务都实现了这些功能，例如著名的 Basecamp，国内的还有 Mangbar（有点混合模式，更像是 Project + SNS）。这相当于是一个流程的规范和约束，参与的人员在这样的框架下面协作，操作就自然会变得有条理。传统的项目管理软件（例如 MS Project），使用者永远都是为了那张甘特图忙活，成员之间无法通过软件来交互，而在线的项目协作更加注重于人员之间的沟通和状态的反馈，项目报告和甘特图系统都可以根据当前的进度自动绘制。

联合式的协作是项目与会话式的混合体，它是一个更趋近于持久的空间，一直都会存在的，不会因为会话和项目的结束而消失。在这样的空间里面，大家可以创建项目、发起会话，能够用多种工具来完成更紧密的协作，例如 Wiki，虽然看上去有些难以理解，但它确是真正协同开始的标志。数以万计的自愿者们用 wiki 完成了全球最大的百科全书 — Wikipedia，通过词条和链接的形式，不同的文档和内容能够自动的被关联起来，参与的成员可以各自去补充不同部分的内容，这非常适合于共享的文档创作和内容建设。

当然还有一些适用于联合式协作的更加强大的方案，我们称之为”协作空间”，以前经常被叫做”群件”（Groupware），曾经的 Lotus Notes，还有最近被 Microsoft 收购的 Groove 就是最佳代表，它们昂贵、复杂、需要大量的时间才能学会如何使用。在这个用户体验为先的时代，我们需要简单的协作方式，可能完全基于 Web 的”协作空间”将会使这种传统软件很好的替代品。

面向公众的协作 — Blog 和讨论组（论坛）

会话式和项目式协作基本上都是封闭式的，只有特定的成员在授权之后才能参与，如果你需要面向公众的开放式交流，Blog 将是你最好的选择。架设一个Blog，花一点点时间，通过你的读者、Blogsphere 和各式各样的RSS聚合与搜索工具，可以让你的想法、观念与见解在互联网上传播，而且还能够得到优秀的评论与反馈。配合一些特定领域的 Social Networks，还能够在开放的网络里面寻找到更合适的协作伙伴。讨论组对于参与的人来所会比Blog更具自由性，大家可以按照讨论线索来查阅内容，但 是有时候也容易跑题，管理者需要很多时间来打理这个公众的讨论区。不过这两种方式各有所长，Blog 更适合内容的传播，而讨论组更适合交流，看你自己的选择了。

理想中的在线协作工具

目前还没有完美的在线协作软件，可能是网络带宽的限制，也可能是用户还没有养成在线协作的习惯。不过，我们也可以想象一下未来会出现的工具（可能已经有了，只是我比较孤陋寡闻而已）：

• 一个简单的、看上去漂亮又专业的程序，它可以多人参与，实现了 Skype、白板、文档共享和思维图之类的功能，用来完成会话式的协作；
• 然后再配上一个容易使用的协作空间，我们可以用它来协作项目、管理相关的资源和链接、存储文档、大家还能够以 wiki 的形式自由的参与和编辑内容，所有的协作成员能够共同的维护这个协作空间

希望很快就能够看到这样强大的在线协作产品，可能 Google 收购了Jotspot 之后正在偷偷搞这方面的研究，到时候微软可要小心咯

评：其实在选择线协作应该本着够用就好得原则，因为一旦协作方式过于复杂，就会不可避免的造成参与协作者学习成本的增加，这样会将相当多的用户群拒之门外。个人认为如果一个提供商能够同时提供email,group,im,space就足够了，当然，再加上blog,office等就太完美了，不过同时一定要保证速度。不知道能否通过整合现有资源来实现，比如Gmail,xdrive,Docs & Spreadsheets,Gtalk(MSN),Ggroups,Blogger，呵呵……
推荐一个vyew.com
在线协作的网站，而且是免费的强烈推荐试用syncwrite进行文档协作！
www.syncwrite.com.cn
我试用了之后，感觉非常好用，比google的writely强多了我跟一些朋友当前通过Google Group，Gmail，Google Docs&Spreadsheets和Skype进行一个合作翻译（37Signals的Getting Real）的项目。除了翻译本身之外的另一个目标就是尝试网络协作，并且获得一些经验。
项目地址：
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/getting-real-chinese Virtual Collaboration: If You Can‘t Work Side-by-Side
The Idea: What do you do if you need or want to collaborate, but you can‘t do so in person? What purposes are best served by weblogs, wikis, and other types of online collaboration tools, spaces and media?

Collaboration entails finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively. This is challenging enough face-to-face in real-time. It‘s doubly difficult virtually and asynchronously. But there are examples of great music, literature, invention, scientific discovery and problem-solving that have come from such handicapped collaboration. How did they do it, and can you improve the likelihood of brilliant virtual collaboration by using the right tools and media?

Let‘s take a look at some of the alternatives:

Tool / Medium
Collaborative Advantages
Collaborative Disadvantages
Best Suited to Collaborative:
weblog
easy to post & comment; content is subscribable/ publishable
participation limited to comments
Conversations
wiki
anyone can contribute content
harder to learn; can be easily sabotaged; inelegant appearance
Projects / Alliances
whiteboard
real-time; anyone can contribute content content only persists for duration of call; possible firewall issues
Conversations / Projects
document-sharing
can be real time; anyone can contribute content
possible firewall issues; attention is focused on a document
Conversations / Projects
IM/skype/phone/ e-mail/ videoconferencing
real-time conversations; audio/visual context; speed
content only persists for duration of call Conversations
mindmaps
shows and documents consensus
can‘t capture detail
Projects
discussion forums
threading of comments; content is subscribable/ publishable limited contextual knowledge of participants; can attract undisciplined behaviours; threads can be hard to follow
Conversations
community of practice/ interest spaces
organization; defined membership; multiple collaborative tools
harder to learn; formality can reduce intimacy and level of participation
Projects / Alliances
personal e-mail groups
flexible; personal; easy to use
e-mail overload/spam; threads get lost or hard to navigate and follow
Projects / Alliances
social networking tools
large number of members; good way to find collaborators
most actual collaboration is done using other tools and media
Finding collaborators
in-person collaboration
easy; real-time; context-rich; flexible
expensive; time-consuming
All of the above if time & cost permits

There are three levels of collaboration based on duration of contact:

• Conversations: Where you‘re in contact just once, or a few times, discussing a particular subject or group of subjects.
• Projects: Where you‘re in contact as often as necessary to complete a project.
• Alliances: Where you‘re in contact in multiple conversations and on multiple projects, working together for an indefinite period of time.

A collaborative conversation may be provoked by an interesting or important idea or an urgent one-off need for information or assistance. Much of the time spent in business is consumed in consulting with others, in canvassing for ideas or suggestions or comments, and in making decisions on what something means or how to respond to it. These are generally quick, collaborative conversations. In large organizations these conversations are usually peer-to-peer (where trust is stronger than up or down the hierarchy), and as size increases further they tend to be more and more intermediated (one middle-manager recently told me that 70% of his e-mail and 50% of his telephone calls are of the "Who should I talk to about X?" variety). In smaller organizations, these conversations are more likely to draw on external networks, and to involve the use of today‘s clunky social networking tools like LinkedIn and eCademy. I have argued before that the next generation of social networking tools should include ‘people-finders‘ that streamline and automate the process of finding the right person (inside or outside the organization) to talk to, so that more time can be spent on actual conversations with those people.

Once you‘ve found the right person to converse with, if they‘re close and inexpensive to talk to in person, that‘s likely what you‘ll do. But what if they aren‘t? How do you quickly provide your Conversation Collaborators with the context they need to converse with you effectively when you can‘t put a chart or a piece of paper in front of them and brief them? Organizations have found that if the person you want to converse with face-to-face is more than two minutes walk (or elevator ride) away, the probability of you making the effort to converse with them in person drops precipitously.

If you have a blog, an audience, and a little time, your blog can serve this need well. Ask a question on a popular blog and you‘ll probably get an informed answer quite quickly (thank you readers!) Most businesses, alas, have few established blogs and even less time. Preferred conversation tools in business, when face-to-face is impossible, are now IM and the telephone -- with IM trumping the phone for its self-documentation, its suitability to multi-tasking, and because it‘s easier to browse than voice-mail, and the phone trumping IM if a lot of iteration is needed to provide context. White-boarding and document-sharing applications, awkward as they are, can be helpful additions to IM and telephone conversations if the participants are savvy enough to use them properly (most aren‘t) and if documents and graphics are needed to provide more context. E-mail is the increasingly unpopular fall-back.

Discussion forums are the ultimate tool of last resort for conversations, because of the disadvantages listed above. In most of the companies I am familiar with, they are only sporadically used and quickly grow stale.

A variety of tools have been developed for more enduring project collaborations and alliance collaborations. Because they tend to involve more participants than conversations do, the logistics get tougher and the effectiveness of these tools gets more challenging. And the threshold point for giving up on the viability of in-person collaboration rises dramatically. I think this is an absolutely critical point. It is the reason large corporations, with the internal resources (people and money) to sequester, have the capacity to collaborate more effectively than small corporations and loose, unfunded collaborative groups (though whether they use that capacity to advantage is another question entirely). Open Source project teams and alliances have pioneered low-budget, virtual, asynchronous collaboration, and are the role model to follow. But is the reason for this perhaps that Open Source collaborations are generally undertaken by exceptionally tech-savvy groups, very agile at using and even inventing their own collaborative tools to get the job done? They usually have a good GUI for the non-techie, but wade into the material and collaboration technology behind a lot of these groups and your head will start spinning. What about the other 95% of the population? If I want to set up a virtual collaboration team to design a model intentional community (with people I might end up spending the rest of the my life with) or to invent a post-capitalist economy (a large project if there ever was one), what tools and media should I use?

Wikis are one place to start -- a bit nerdy and physically inelegant but functional and not that hard to learn once you take the plunge. They are, however, asynchronous tools, which is a significant barrier to true collaboration.

There are some more robust collaborative ‘spaces‘ for communities of interest and communities of practice to adopt, but some of the best ‘groupware‘ (like Groove and Exchange and eRooms) costs money and requires considerable learning to use its different tools effectively. These tools generally also require a coordinator to invest a lot of time to setting up and managing the ‘space‘.

There are a variety of document-sharing technologies in the market, which allow several people to see a document at once and to ‘take control‘ each in turn to change that document.

Ideally, using a combination of

1. Skype (free global VoIP telephony),
   
2. White-boarding (everyone online can see what anyone posts to the white-board),
   
3. Document-sharing and
   
4. Mindmapping or some similar session annotation tool (everyone can see what the group‘s ‘scribe‘ has documented as the findings, decisions and next actions from the collaboration)
   

would be a close approximation to an in-person collaborative session. But that‘s a lot of technology to juggle on your screen, to hog and interfere with your bandwidth, and (if you opt for the more powerful tools in these categories) can also require some outlay of money. My experience has been (thanks in no small part to the valuable insights of online communication wizard Robin Good and Skypemaster Stu Henshall) that video-conferencing (seeing the people you‘re talking with online) is a "nice to have" not a "need to have", especially when bandwidth limitations force you to choose which applications to have running at any one time.

I am confident that, as bandwidth and processing power continue to expand, we will soon see:

• A single, free, reliable, easy-to-use, professional-looking application that will provide what I‘ve called Simple Virtual Presence -- the four applications listed above plus the option of videoconferencing (illustrated above), and
• A simple, free, easy-to-use collaboration space where the results of the online collaboration sessions, and a library of relevant resources and links, are stored, with wiki-like capability so it can be maintained by any and all in the group.

Now that would be a real virtual collaboration environment.