at Gizmos, Inc: the mill on Ricci Street

PC Workshop:
Collaboration

other pages in this section
email | instant message (IM) | telephony
personal digital assistant (PDA) | meetings

add gizmos, widgets, and wikis

other sections in the PC Workshop
operating system
webmaking | business media
office productivity | webtop services

other Ricci Street pages
mba 504 | mba 600
basic skills form

this page
skills and tools | science or fiction?

email | instant message
telephony | PDA | meetings | blogware

add gizmos, widgets, and wikis

Getting it

Something's happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
-- Bob Dylan

Well, Mr. Jones doesn't get it yet. What does that mean, "Get it"?

It's a colloquial phrase used for all manner of learning curves. To Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wasn't hip to the social changes brewing in the early 1960's. When we're ignorant, we don't get it yet. At some point, if we keep learning, we get it, whatever it may be.

For the Internet, "getting it" means understanding its collaborative nature. It's not a thing; it's an agreement. It's a built environment where code is law. That law can be changed, but there's no one in charge to do the changing.

Plenty of computer science PhD's don't get it. Plenty of system administrators don't get it. Plenty of grandparents do.

Getting it doesn't mean liking it or approving of it or wanting to be involved in it. Clifford Stoll clearly gets the Internet, yet he has made a career of bashing it. And he's correct. Getting it and embracing it mean losing something. Getting cars meant for many people losing their best friend, their horse.

While information highway may be a useful metaphor for the physical infrastructure of the Internet, it is very limited for those who get it. On the highway, we're all in separate automobiles. While in the cars, we cooperate, but we don't collaborate.

As a metaphor, web has limits, too. It implies spiders, flies, and predatory food chains, competition, not collaboration.

Muddying the metaphors, through the 1990's, people who clearly didn't get the Internet, aka the clueless, tried to exploit it. They were conquistadores, the alien colonists trying to impose an old world on a new world that had been getting along just fine without them. Even worse were the people who did get it but pandered to (or sold stock to) those who didn't.

Academic consultants told corporate executives how to "unlock the value" of the Internet by treating it as another competitive distribution channel. Like slow TV.

Intellectual property lawyers scared Congress into enacting the pitiful Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

Get-rich-quick folks started dot-coms and got paper-rich with IPO's. If they were lucky, they cashed out before the dot-bomb crash of Spring 2000.

I recently read a series of ink-on-paper reports given to a town planning board by MBA students in a top U.S. university program's e-commerce course. Clearly, neither the students nor their professor has ever made a web page. They know all about the Internet, but none of them gets it.

A more useful metaphor might be a theater (too artsy) or a market (too commercial) or a Cybertown, hence Ricci Street. These metaphors draw attention to the live, participatory, collaborative nature of the Internet. The community.

My 16-year-old daughter would rather gab on IM (instant messaging) than on the telephone because the telephone is so limiting, she says, so one-on-one. She can run half a dozen IM's at the same time and feel much more connected to her friends. More communicating gets done. She gets the Internet, so do her friends, and they're on their way to adulthood.

Why Aren't We Collaborating?
by David Weinberger
Darwin Magazine, July 2, 2002

Thanks to the Internet (and intranets and extranets), we can all just get along. But we're still not. ...

It's because collaborative software brings home to organizations what the Internet should have made clear: Collaborating means climbing down from your perch up the org chart and being treated as an equal. My friend Steve Yost ... says that his legwork shows that the real reason is that collaborative software requires people to change their work habits. I think we're both right.

Are you ready?

Tools, toys, gadgets, or gizmos, call them what you will; these devices connect us to each other.

In this section of the Gizmos, Inc., Toolkit, I'm putting the tools for written, oral, and visual communication that are either part of computers or increasingly have "computers" embedded in them. They are parts of wireless networks.

Except for email, many of these gizmos are not quite ready for prime time yet, not quite easy enough to use for the majority of adopters. The connection is too slow, the interfaces are too strange, the learning curves are too steep. The Internet is still an anarchic, mysterious place teeming with child pornographers, credit-card thieves, music thieves, and napsters.

Inevitably, these gizmos will bend to our will. One by one, the market will spur the development of features that solve all their current limitations. We will live on the Evernet, where the network is the computer and it's always on everywhere. The gizmos will be tiny, fast and cheap. Their use will be intuitive. We'll trust them. Learn more.

As our transportation and communication systems have been developing inexorably, so too the collaborate tools that today seem like gizmos are tomorrow going to be as invisible, most of the time, as the chair we sit on. It's there, it's terrific, we depend on it. But we don't think about it very often. The chair doesn't intrude on our thoughts nor do we have any reason to struggle with it as we struggle with computers now.

National Semiconductor's Geode Origami Mobile Communicator

a multi-function device that combines some of today's most popular electronic products all into one package:

> digital camera
> digital camcorder
> video conferencing terminal
> Internet access device
> email terminal
> Internet picture frame
> MP3 player
> smart phone

These collaborative tools are here and more are coming whether we like it or not, struggle as we will. They let us write to each other: email. They let us speak to each other: telephones. They let us see each other: cameras and monitors. They let us do all that without being tethered to a bulky PC, though the seeing each other comes into its own with a high-resolution monitor. The fiber is laid and the wireless standards are gaining international agreement.

This development is inevitable, like an algorithm. It is more like Darwin's evolution, a theory that would have been developed by someone if not by him, than it is like Beethoven's Ninth, which could have been created only by the person who wrote the previous eight. It was a one-shot deal. Evolution, on the other hand, has always been there, waiting for someone to articulate it. Had Beethoven died at the same age as Mozart, no one else would have written those symphonies.

We don't have to worry about that on the Internet. Too many 15-year-olds on six continents are already tinkering and hacking and talking to each other about it at Slashdot.

Skills

building communities online by using the Internet -- email, instant message, telephony, PDAs, and meeting software:

for asynchronous activities like discussions and sharing

for synchronous activities like work and play

Tools

hardware: desktop, laptop, and hand-held computers; embedded devices

input devices: keyboard, microphone, camera

Internet connection: broadband, wireless

software: email, instant messages, telephony, conferences, meetings, whiteboards, calendaring, presentations

Is it science or is it fiction?

Collaboration gizmos are converging. We read messages on our telephones. We get internet service through our TV cable. We watch movies on our computers. The computer network doesn't care because it's stupid. All it's doing is passing around packets of ones and zeros.

This convergence is an ongoing, speedy process, so it's hard to separate these gizmos into categories. It might be better to note features shared by some or all of them.

The collaboration can be written, oral or visual. We can share email or any file attached to email. We can talk while we listen to someone's song playlist. We can browse the web together, or watch each other in a little video screen while we work together on a document shared on a whiteboard.

The collaboration can be synchronous, that is, take place at the same time. We can communicate one-on-one or in groups. We can communicate in the one-on-one while we're also participating in a group. Sort of like sitting at one table during happy hour in a crowded bar and also talking with the person you're back-to-back with, who's at the next table.

The collaboration can be asynchronous, like email. It can be many-to-many, like the Bistro, a bulletin board where everyone leaves messages for everyone else.

Video Phones: Behind the Scenes in Afghanistan
by Nathan Segal
October 8, 2001

In the last few weeks, we have seen many video broadcasts from Afghanistan, which are remarkable in several ways. First, for the graininess and low quality, and secondly, for how these images have come to our television screens. A question many people are asking is: “What is this technology and how does it work?” ...

"It’s actually just a video conferencing system similar to what you would use on a computer with a camera. It’s all self-contained into one little suitcase which is easy to carry around and is very user friendly. That’s the reason why it’s more conducive to our requirements. You then plug that unit into an M4 satellite phone which gives you a 64 K data bandwidth which is what we’re using to transmit. It’s basically streaming video. ...

It’s a standard satellite phone which comes in a little suitcase. When you open it up, you have a regular handset and a flat antenna that opens up, which you have to aim south. ...

It can run on a car battery, where you plug it into the cigarette lighter, or it can plug into an AC outlet. It depends on where you are at the time. When CNN used it, I think they were just running it off a car battery. We’ve used it in a hotel where we plugged it in and stuck the flat antenna out by the window and kept everything else inside, closed the curtains and nobody could tell what we were doing.”

gadgets and gizmos

telephones, PDA's

Cingular's Integrated Voice & Data Devices - the ease of a phone with the productivity of a handheld

Handspring's Treo

Put a video camera in one of theses things, hook it up to the Internet, stream your video anywhere. For instance, to your refrigerator where everyone in the family can see it when they get home.

Samsung's HomePAD Refrigerator

What will the refrigerators of the future be like? How about a refrigerator that detects the shelf life of your food and informs you about it, or one that automatically displays a list of items stored in the fridge on the door?

home networks

Building a small network for sharing files and Internet access requires no deep-geek rocket science, but it does involve a number of small steps that must be done right for the whole thing to work. It's the sort of task that, while not hard, can be somewhat exacting and tedious.

Basically, take your newest machine and make it the main computer.

Hardware

Run the outside connection to your main computer, whether it be a phone jack or a broadband modem, either cable or DSL.

Then connect that main computer to the hub, for example Linksys's EtherFast® Cable/DSL Router with 8-Port Switch (above right).

Diagram of connections

Each laptop connected to the hub will need sufficient cabling to extend as far as it may need to go. A cable 20 or 50 feet long is not unreasonable. Linksys's competitor Belkin makes a wide variety of networking cables (above left). This equipment has been around a long while and generally works very well.

Tip |  Cheap hubs and cables are usually as good as expensive one.

Unplug yourself! Use a wireless hub like the one in the classroom. If you have enough battery power, you can roam where you want to.

Software

If your computers have Windows XP, run the Network Setup Wizard available via Start | Control Panel | Network Connections. Then run the same Wizard on all the other computers.

Each machine needs to have a name. This is a good time to be creative.

 Best Bet!
How Home Networking Works
by Jeff Tyson

With your computers connected, you could:

Share a single printer between computers
Use a single Internet connection
Share files such as images, spreadsheets and documents
Play games that allow multiple users at different computers
Send the output of a device like a DVD player or Webcam to your other computer(s)

Create your own small home/office Windows network

Networking for the Rest of Us
by Greg Weinstein

email

The killer app is the tool that will first get a person online. As soon as the first computers got hooked up to the network thirty years ago, the computer scientists started sending email, personal, chatty messages that didn't have anything to do with computers or science. Somewhere along the way, we started sending more emails than snail mails (paper via the U.S. Postal Service). Now we send lots more.

instant messages

Chat has left those "rooms" and come to your house, one-on-one or many-to-many. Instant messaging is how 14-year-old princesses hold court, how teachers hold office hours, and how customer service answers questions. At times, a third of the traffic on the Internet is chat.

We're starting to trade images via IM, too.

Internet telephony

From the network's point of view, it's wireless. From your point of view, it's mobile. It seems just like a telephone but Internet telephony sends the voice in little digital packets, not as an analog frequency. And you can get your email and news headlines, too.

We're starting to stream video along with our voices.

personal digital assistant (PDA)

A desktop scales down to a laptop. Then a laptop scales down to a hand-held. A personal digital assistant runs on batteries, so you can take it anywhere.

They are adding voice (what we used to call phones) just as the cell phones are adding gaming, messaging, and imaging. It's called convergence.

meeting

Participate in a community: group projects for work, games for play, a far-flung family's photo album, distance learning, conferences. Such meetings require major trade-offs. Online isn't as "good" as face-to-face, of course not. But for an lot of purposes, it's good enough and it sure beats not meeting at all.

synchronous - videoconferencing

asynchronous - wiki, discussion board

use blogware

Remember how you used a library to take notes and make copies? What do you do instead on the Web? To harvest information and make it accessible and usable, you can develop your own web logging system. Or you can make life easier and start a weblog, aka blog.