How can CISV use this new (overhyped?) communication tool?
In a much-covered move, Google presented Wave last autumn as a brand-new communication tool. As a mix of e-mail, Wiki, Facebook and Chat it may have the chance of becoming the next big internet tool. In my experience CISV has often been fast in embracing new communication tools - no wonder: The organization is world-wide and money is scarce, but almost everybody is well-connected.
If you're not sure, what I'm talking about, please check out this longish video, it is actually quite fun watching.
As a first step, I would like to invite everybody to get an account. It's not open yet, but I have a ton of invites left, so please send me an e-mail (ftb@absolutpicknick.de), if you haven't been invited yet. If others have invites left, please leave a comment below.
Then I would like to invite everybody to discuss, how CISV could use Google Wave. Please post suggestions in the comments section. If people already have experiences (I know people at the Writeshop a week ago in Newcastle tried it), I would be curious to learn about how it worked for you.
In a much-covered move, Google presented Wave last autumn as a brand-new communication tool. As a mix of e-mail, Wiki, Facebook and Chat it may have the chance of becoming the next big internet tool. In my experience CISV has often been fast in embracing new communication tools - no wonder: The organization is world-wide and money is scarce, but almost everybody is well-connected.
If you're not sure, what I'm talking about, please check out this longish video, it is actually quite fun watching.
As a first step, I would like to invite everybody to get an account. It's not open yet, but I have a ton of invites left, so please send me an e-mail (ftb@absolutpicknick.de), if you haven't been invited yet. If others have invites left, please leave a comment below.
Then I would like to invite everybody to discuss, how CISV could use Google Wave. Please post suggestions in the comments section. If people already have experiences (I know people at the Writeshop a week ago in Newcastle tried it), I would be curious to learn about how it worked for you.
I got some invites, too... and we're trying to use Wave for our Mosaic Project as a coordination / collaboration tool ;-)
My first introduction to Wave was watching that fairly long video, and I was sitting there enthralled, thinking two things: (1) this was going to 'change the world' and (2) this was going to be incredible for CISV. A few weeks later I finally got an invitation to Wave, tried it out a few times and was significantly underwhelmed. It seemed fairly clunky, but more than that, it seemed to be little more than 'everything thats already good about online communication' smacked together (and sometimes not working as well as the alternatives - including both gmail chat & google docs).
My account has sat near completely dormant since then, but at the back of my head I was still asking myself the same question you did, Nick - can this be useful for Mosaic, particularly for my committee, in any context? Preparing & sharing common documents at AIM was the obvious example, but again I wondered whether using docs was the better choice.
I was at the writeshop last week and I participated in trying to use Wave to prepare our notes throughout the week. Sometimes it worked really well - It was great being able to collaborate so quickly and openly with each other, to be able to stick documents, photos and videos straight into the notes to keep everything easy to find and refer to. It was nice knowing that (when we did keep it up-to-date) people from our committees or from elsewhere in CISV (albeit only those we invited, but hopefully we invited all those who cared) could see what we were doing as we were doing it, and comment as they wished. In these ways it was certainly a fairly democratic tool and a simple way to keep us organised.
But I still see downsides too. Firstly, there are still a lot of bugs, and the constant crashing and stalling made it hard for me to maintain a lot of interest. Secondly, there were times (usually during the most dynamic discussions) that no one updated anything, everyone hoping that someone else was playing notetaker. This is not really the fault of Wave itself, but it does represent an issue with 'collaborative' approaches, where no one has the designated responsibility. Thirdly, it did, at times, paradoxically feel a little 'exclusive' in that there were a few people there (admittedly, mostly slightly older in age) who didn't know what Wave was, didn't seem to want to learn, and therefore couldn't even see the notes at any stage as we were going through the meeting saying "add it to the wave, add it to the wave!"
Also, we now still have the challenge of transferring our notes to something that can actually be printed and shared, which means converting all the attached documents and pictures into real language on a real page - and this is likely to be a lot of work. I think there's likely to be a lot of gaps and inconsistencies in what we wrote.
So far, then, I remain undecided on whether wave will catch on as a really useful thing for us in CISV, or whether it'll be more of a gimmick... I definitely think there are practical applications for it that will come in handy, particularly at AIM and other meetings. But I think it still has a long way to go to be everything it could be.
Thanks, Chris for your extensive comment on the use of Wave for the Writeshop!!!
I didn't understand Wave at the beginning. I didn't see why it would be useful until a couple of us in the Connect Team got a few invitations and invited the whole team. And for the past month or so, we have been setting our work plan and work frame for 2010 on the google wave and commenting and commenting on everything we had. Usually, this would have been done in 4 or 5 google docs, but we're doing it on one wave with so many replies - but the beauty of it is that you do not lose track of things because everything is recorded by date and time.
So I do see the usefulness of the Google Wave in committees since it is working amazingly for us and is getting all the work condensed in one place to follow the string of thoughts and it has made us more efficient.
The only downside (other than the bugs of the Wave itself) is that we need to check the wave every day to see who commented but we aren't doing that, so it's taking more time than if we were doing this by e-mail since we check our e-mails daily - but e-mails in this case would have been soooo messy.
So from personal usage experience, I say that the Google Wave is a pretty good tool for committees and planning groups in CISV :)