Recently, a couple of events allowed me to look again at how groups of people "do things together online".

I've had a chance to meet up a few times in a short period with Aldo de Moor, and that helped us reflect on where things have come since we first drafted the contours of our "social context model", nearly ten years ago now.

Add a few potential projects in the pipeline that deal with global networks of people who should produce something together. And the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into the NABUUR concept, to see how it is still pretty unique.

Aldo and I quickly concluded that although a lot is happening, and happening fast, there actually has been little progress in what we see as the hardest part of (online) collaboration: supporting work flows. Sure enough, people find ways to use the techno-centric tools that emerge, and services like Basecamp are making inroads into this. But most platforms still have some way to go.

On the e-collaboration blog I have posted an interview with Joost Oorthuizen (here) One of the questions I asked him was:

You are an experienced face-to-face facilitator, and this is your first online experience. What is different as an online facilitator?

Well, my first observation is that there is more similarity than I expected. Also e-conferences need facilitation, and participants do want such facilitation, and strongly relate it, very much similar to the way they appreciate face-to-face facilitation. So, as a facilitator, one can ‘connect’ to the participants, take ownership of the process of the discussion, ‘lead’ participants towards certain outcomes. This is easier and more similar to facilitating workshops than expected.Another observation is that e-conferences are far less intrusive than face-to-face meetings. The latter requires people to sit together, to listen to each other, to listen to a facilitator for often too long a time, etcetera. How often do we not feel that we waste a lot of time during face-to-face meetings, or that we have to work with/listen to people who do not really appreciate. So, this e-conference method leaves participation much more open. One can easily ‘vote with your feet’ (mouse) if not interested. Put more positively, people can participate whenever they like, whenever they are up to it, in their own time- and energy frames!

At the Dutch e-collaboration blog, Maaike van Steenhoven has posted the conclusions of her interviews with about 15 development organizations about the introduction of new tools for e-collaboration: http://icollaborate.blogspot.com/2006/11/findings.html

She describes the overall phase Dutch NGOs are in, concerning the implementation of e-collaboration in their work and how they became enthusiastic.  Then she describes the implementation stage of the various new tools that were introduced (ranging from moodle to social bookmarking). How did people start looking for the right tool, how did they approach and convince others and how are they planning for the future? She also presents an overview of the benefits e-collaboration brought to the people who are experimenting with it and the difficulties they encountered in the broadest way.