Skills day: Ross Gardler, OSS Watch: email in a web 2.0 world
OSS Watch provides unbiased advice and guidance on open source software. Ross has a background in OSS, is an active open source developer, and conducts 80% of his discussions via email.
I’ve experimented with social software but always come back to email as it really works for he kind of work we do. We don’t know which of the new companies will survive and still be there in the long term so let’s see where email is in today’s picture.
What will support communication properly?
Communication is:
Dissemination
Discussion
Learning
Coordination
Web 2.0 is very good at some of those things such as dissemination but not that inclusive for discussion, limits the pool of people that learning from
93% of internet users check their email accounts
17% have a social networking profile
42% students
15% of employed
What aspects of communication do web 2.0 technologies effectively support?
_ Consider: learning is enhanced when we reach a larger audience
_ Discussion is more complete if all voices are heard
Do web 2.0 allow us to reach the audience we want to reach?
Comment: discussion boards are much more useful than email discussions because can look at thread and easily filter out the ones you are not interested in
Ross: but forums require me to go to the web whereas email comes to me… I’m an expert user of my email client so can have threaded discussions and so on. But it’s about policy of use – if it’s not appropriate for a list to have a social announcement then you enforce that strictly, you say that you can’t have that here but there’s a list where you can put it.
Some tools such as Google groups give you both an email and a web interface, also searchable archives etc. Public list, not private.
Comment: under freedom of information the idea that something is private is not so clear anyway
Comment: with a web forum you can join and easily see the archives and catch up – you can’t do that so easily with email
Ross: there are ways round that… a well-managed email list means you can do that, can search email archives etc and the big difference is that it’s an open standard so can be done behind the scenes quite easily but if JISCMail, for example, had been using Facebook for the last 10 years then they couldn’t do that
Comment: so an enhanced use of email is a better way to go than jumping onto wikis, blogs etc?
Ross: email works but we do have a problem of info overload that we have to address. The tools are available though so we should be looking into that rather than steering towards something else, a closed environment, which may mean that you’re locked into the technology that you choose. But, a web 2.0 service that allows me to interact with it in the way I want to act with it – such as through email - is a winning service. It’s about openness and for me email is the right medium for discussion because it’s open and people use it.
Comment: I’m in marketing and if I advertised events on wikis and blogs half the people I’m aiming at wouldn’t know about them because they wouldn’t go there – they have to actively choose to go to them – whereas with email you know they will know about it
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[…] about current social networking sites. Some of my main concerns revolve around the fact that my email client is my main online communication tool and I don’t want to work with a suboptimal communication channel (although I’m happy to […]
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