Dillon Deliberating

Use Google Wave or your sacked.

My #ukgc10 started early for the best possible reason; breakfast at the Pompidou Cafe in Kings Cross. Around the table were two barcampers who arrived from Lincoln having started train journeys at four in the morning. GovCamp UK inspire commitment. Not just national but international with one Barcamper coming over from Norway.

I am not going to recap my entire day but instead focus on Google Wave (more blog posts to follow) When I proposed  a session on Google Wave  this was my pitch:

1. A chance to discuss the potential or otherwise of Google Wave for organisations.

2. Or you could come along and trash Google Wave.

Reason two proved popular. However that would be unfair and the session was insightful and stimulating. Put it  this way alot of critical thinking occurred.   Ok I'm biased as I lead the session.

Kicking of the session I did not seek to defend Google Wave but focus on potential benefits. Wave has a practical application, for example planning website content. Basically tasks that generate lots of email people should consider the Wave option. They may well consider, use Wave then dismiss it and rightly point out that other tools can deliver what Wave can do much much better. Huddle is perhaps one such tool.

However Google Wave brings together so much in one place you cannot help getting intrigued by the potential. Wave is marketed as an email killer but then combines that with wiki functionality. So imagine a Wave world were your colleagues are not just cc. or bcc on an email that cannot be found in six months but instead part of a Wave on an equal footing. Though you can introduce inequality by designating some on a Wave to read only, meaning they cannot edit a wave entry.

First problem the way Wave is set up now, if to many  people are participating in a Wave the conversation becomes unmanageable or a better way to look at it; the conversation becomes anarchic. Not the worst thing that can happen. However for organisations conversations have a purpose so my view is that when creating a Wave for a task or to resolve a problem could consider these points:

(a) As the creator of that wave use your first entry to lay down some markers.

(b) Purpose of this Wave. What it hopes to achieve and how long it will be in use.

(c) say who will provide light touch editorial lead for the content of the Wave. This person needs to oversee the Wave, tidy up, pro active on adding apps to the wave for example.

(d) A wave like all collaborative tools does not need loads of 
participants; two may indeed suffice.

(e) keep your Wave in 'private' mode even then take care about information on a Wave. Try this litmus test; if you are prepared to put organisational info on Google docs then put it on Wave.

(f) designate who on the wave has read only access.

(g) Apply standard wiki behavior if a Wave is wandering then start a new more focussed one.

All of the above seem straight forward but once you start using Wave it anything but straight forward. Intutitive it ain'nt. Ten minutes on Google Wave and your appreciation of the genius simplicity of Twitter will increase a hundred fold. When people say to you "I just don'nt get Twitter" then my advice is to send them a Wave invite.

Oh the legendary Wave invites. There was a time when children and pets were exchanged for a Wave invite. The hubris of the press conference that launched Wave had optimism not seen since Spinal Tap announced plans for there world tour.

Incidentally if want to advise someone new to Wave if people are discussing Spinal Tap. First avoid starting your phrase "simply enter ..." no you have to enter this:

with:public spinal tap. Then press search.

These are known as operators but to me it looks like a DOS command, how cool is that? This goes to the heart of the problem if 'tech' people at GovCamp were struggling with Wave this is clearly not a sign that mass wave adoption is a week away.

 Reasons to be cautiously cheerful:

One: wave is still in beta invite only. Google could address user experience issues and begin intergrating wave with other applications such as Calender and Documents. Interestingly a contributer to the session posited the idea that Wave is like a testbed for Google and that Wave functions will appear on other Google Tools and having served it's purpose will wither on the Vine. Who remembers Google Lively?

Two: People are using Google Wave. Type: with:public Pakistan and their will find people discussing issues which you can join or just listen to. Wave has a feature called playback wereby you press play and the information activity on the wave is slowly (to slowly)  displayed to you one entry at at a time. If this was quicker you could play a wave and learn.

Three: For organisations that work across timezones Wave has great potential for collaborative working and planning. On These Waves you could embed a Google Calender or document. As wave is open source you could use the growing number of apps being made available. One which is relatively easy to use is a basic polling app.

On the tool front choosing to run a session on Wave was never going to be easy. Though at one point in the session I sensed Google help had arrived. Ten minutes into the session a Google staff member arrived, surely their arrival was to help me explain Google Wave? Actually they kindly offered a bigger screen for our session. Just one example of the excellent and attentive hospitality Google gave UK GovCamp2010

However the session I feel was interesting in that we were all able to apply critical thinking to an emerging tool. The feeling coming from the session can be gleaned from the tweets posted.

Were Google listening? Later I found out that during the Wave session one staffer was paying attention to #ukgc10 Tweets on their Nexus phones during the Wave session. Who knows maybe 2011 GovCamp  will see some of the conversation spillover onto Wave.  Finally a big thanks to those who joined the GovCamp Google Wave.