If you are a free agent, you may like me wish for the ultimate collaborative environment that enables you to easily work with other untethered, non-local free agents as if you were in the same place and organization. Email was the first solution and remains the best and most ubiquitous at this time. Email works for low intensity needs.
Online communities and their latest offspring, social networking services, are *lite* collaborative environments. You get messaging, testimonials and fancy bulletin boards. Community members can create them. This gives you conversations around topics of interest.
In her excellent post today entitled the Uncompany, Jeneane Sessum asks for more. She talks about the features of a powerful and expensive collaborative environment called e-room that she used at Ketchum Communications when she worked there.
Jeneane's post put collaborative environments front and center on my radar screen. Her description of e-room made me realize that this is one of the key missing pieces in making our distributed, near-jobless future work.
We have tons of software and hardware technology to make a great collaborative environment. I often work alone rather than try to coordinate with remote free agents. What if we took all the little pieces of technology floating around from bulletin boards, social networking services, email, wikis and blogs and brought them together for the purposes of letting us work together remotely?
I had never heard of e-room. Jeneane also mentioned Basecamp - a brand new collaborative environment for creative services businesses. She noted that Basecamp lacks a key ingredient from her perspective, a central server where you can put files in a place that lets teammates and clients have limited or unlimited access to them.
Now that I think of it, a few months ago, one of my clients asked me about something like this. He wondered how much it would cost to put an online environment together that would let him present educational materials and management tools to his entrepreneur clients and have them be able to enter information into the tools or comment on the materials online so that they could all benefit from the interaction without having to get together for a meeting in *meatspace*.
I can see this kind of thing being delivered as a service which would include the option to have say 250 gigs of storage for file sharing (1 big hard drive these days). There would probably need to be levels of service because some industries need collaboration more than others. In the creative services world, you need a *lot* of shared storage for one thing and teamwork is *central* to the performance of the work.
Business networking would be a great companion to this type of collaborative service because once you have the ability to collaborate with adhoc teams, you want to have a great network full of potential teammates. And every time you work with people you strengthen your knowledge of their skills, abilities, personalities, values and workstyles.
In fact this lack of collaborative tools has limited the value of business networking services. They currently are all talk. The best you get is conversations around bulletin boards. People don't put much at stake in these environments. If people start working or playing together online, they not only get to know each other better but they get to build trust by tentatively and then more intensively collaborating.
This is all new to me. But I now see how it fits in as another crucial piece of the tech ronin puzzle. Stay tuned.