Metaphors for Collaborative Technologies

This morning I installed ChatZilla, an extension to my FireFox browser, so that I could directly chat with Drupal developers from around the world on the #drupal Instant Relay Chat channel. IRC is a way to directly chat to groups of people who hang out at different virtual water coolers.

Ross Mayfield runs Socialtext -- a company that develops wiki software for businesses -- all of his employees work from home and are spread out around the country.

Mayfield had an interesting blog post (via Nancy White) that provided some great metaphors for the broadband and social tools that his company uses to facilitate collaboration and still remain connected and productive:

* Socialtext [i.e. wikis] -- the building and garden
* IRC -- the hallway
* FreeConference.com -- the conference room
* Skype -- the meeting rooms
* IM -- talking over the cubical
* VNC -- peeping over the cubical
* Our blogs -- the front porch
(NOTE: I added all of the links above)

So I hope to start integrating more of these different communication technologies to for my collaborative project.

From my experience with IRC this morning -- I think that the metaphor of a hallway for an IRC chat is very appropriate. There were a lot of people in the hallway, and I was able to have a quick discussion with a couple of developers hanging out. I got some leads to follow up with a more detailed conversation via e-mail, IM or Skype.

I also hope to start integrating and using podcasting and vlogging soon -- This will be easier after I upgrade some hardware at the end of this week so that I can run the latest version of Final Cut Pro.