Virtual Serendipity?
22/10/06 18:45 Filed in: Work
A thought
came to me the other as I was in the company office
talking on the phone to a colleague about an issue,
when another member of the team stuck his head over
the divider and said that he couldn't help but
overhear and he'd had to deal with the same issue
recently and had some knowledge he could share.
This triggered the thought that one of the things you miss when working in a virtual team, or remotely is the serendipity of conversations. I don't read up on research on collaboration but clearly it must be very difficult to do. This is why, despite the tools all being available from the home office (and sometimes better - another rant - another time), the lack of this discovery or bumping into people is something that I am making deliberate efforts to get into the office.
On another tack, but related - vaguely, is the development of social tools - such as del.icio.us that enable you to share things. But I have been using Last.fm for sometime letting iScrobbler send up my listening habits.For those of you unaware. Last.fm is a website that seeks to give you suggested other music to listen to, dependent on your listening habits. the iScrobbler sends up to your area on Last.fm the songs you play and Last.fm builds a picture and recommends other music. There is also Pandora which seeks to use an algorithmic approach instead to make recommendations. It might be interesting to take the approach and apply it to other things, It was interesting to see on the BBc's Dragons Den programme that someone was trying to do something very similar with books. Clearly none of the dragons were aware of either Last.fm or Pandora. One of the things about Last.fm is that it takes a more social view of providing groups to allow people to share, whereas Pandora can be used almost in isolation.
This triggered the thought that one of the things you miss when working in a virtual team, or remotely is the serendipity of conversations. I don't read up on research on collaboration but clearly it must be very difficult to do. This is why, despite the tools all being available from the home office (and sometimes better - another rant - another time), the lack of this discovery or bumping into people is something that I am making deliberate efforts to get into the office.
On another tack, but related - vaguely, is the development of social tools - such as del.icio.us that enable you to share things. But I have been using Last.fm for sometime letting iScrobbler send up my listening habits.For those of you unaware. Last.fm is a website that seeks to give you suggested other music to listen to, dependent on your listening habits. the iScrobbler sends up to your area on Last.fm the songs you play and Last.fm builds a picture and recommends other music. There is also Pandora which seeks to use an algorithmic approach instead to make recommendations. It might be interesting to take the approach and apply it to other things, It was interesting to see on the BBc's Dragons Den programme that someone was trying to do something very similar with books. Clearly none of the dragons were aware of either Last.fm or Pandora. One of the things about Last.fm is that it takes a more social view of providing groups to allow people to share, whereas Pandora can be used almost in isolation.
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