Humour

Collaboration for the coy

T A Balasubramanian on a blogger’s effort to get the right message across

This has been a long week for Doodh Byramji. Known also as plain ‘Doodh,’ to friends, he is presently an IT project research engineer with Baffle Technologies, or Baff-Tech. Byramji is frequently persuaded to probe into the oddest corners of the computer world, especially when he is assigned these tasks by his CEO, Baidyanath Baffle, the founder and owner of Baff-Tech.

His present project is to get the inside story on what Groucho Goose, Manager, Slinky Marketing Strategy for Confusing Clients, from Duckbill & Goose, is up to in his latest venture.

Here is the carefully written diary of Byramji, who prefers to put everything he finds in the form of recorded conversations.

Dear Diary (writes Byramji): Today, it is my pleasant task to find out more about the shifting sands of technology. I visit my old friend, Groucho, who has been sending me enthusiastic emails about what he describes as ‘talking to the whole world.’

We are sitting, as usual, at a table in Quick Sip, the trendy restaurant that Groucho seems to be patronizing frequently. “Well Groucho, from all your cheery messages, it seems there are massive changes facing business corporations, and you have something exciting to share about this?”

“Ah, Doodh, so you read my emails, eh?” says Groucho, ordering coffee for himself and a ginger tea for his guest. “We are bang in the middle of an era of mass collaboration, Doodh.”

“Why is it happening? I mean, what is this sudden awakening of the urge to mass merge?”

“Well, because it is all there—the media and the means to merge, I would say. By harnessing the ideas of people in all industries in every time zone, global collaboration—with a flood of tools like blogs, wikis, social networking, podcasts, virtual Web connections and video sharing—is opening the doors of corporations to fuel innovation, partnerships, and an endless stream of personalized products and services.”

“That’s been going on for some time with individuals, but you are talking of corporations now?”

“Yes, I am. Earlier this year, I was talking to Dr Merry Mixer, co-founder of Mash-Dash Inc, a company with the noble mission of bringing collaborative computing from the wild Web world into the sedate corporate boardroom. He described, rather vividly, how he goes about helping his company figure out the right message for its enterprise search product—called Mash Tray. Now, even with his over-the-top branding, as the CTO in a software company, he still has to figure out how to explain a product to potential buyers. It is vital that the message he sends out must be clear and cut across the cloud of the average customer’s own scatterbrained ideas of what collaboration is all about. Getting your message wrong can be a disaster. But how do you get your message right?”

“I wondered about that. A ‘Mash Tray’ for collaboration—well, it has possibilities.”

“Oh, the brand name is often the last thing that a customer considers. What, after all, does Plaxo or Vista or Red Hat convey as a name? Now, Dr Mixer told me something fascinating during that meeting. He said he does more and more of his analysis and refinement of his thinking about messaging on his blog, The Merry Mixer, than through brand name creativity or the ancient practice of brainstorming. ‘Why should I restrict myself to talk-to-few when I can talk-to-the-world with even less effort?’ he said. When he pushes his call for ideas out in the public space, he gets back all kinds of astounding thinking that he never would otherwise. The world, indeed is Mixer’s—and, by default, any blogger’s—oyster.”

“All very nice, I am sure,” I say. “But what does it mean to an ordinary mortal like me who is petrified about sharing anything? I cannot imagine collaborating with more than two people in my office before losing my nerve.”

“Ah, Doodh, you are not alone. Earlier this week, my friend Chico sheepishly confided to me that, as a CIO in Mash Media Corporation, he has just started blogging, and it seems that he has, for almost two years, allowed the fear of being ridiculed to stop him from broadcasting his opinion across the Web.”

“That goes for me too, Groucho. I cannot get myself to open up to the enormity of it all—all those millions of eyeballs. I read your emails earlier this week and pondered over the question, how do you get over the fear? I’m not sure I ever did. I’m not sure I ever will.”

“Now Chico would understand that,” laughs Groucho. “He went on to blog, nevertheless, because at Mash Media everyone blogs. And that includes the finance guy who is, otherwise, a regular bean counter; the reception counter girl, who discovered that she had become popular as a hair style advisor in six different countries; and even the grizzly partner in the firm, Mr Old Timer, who writes a monthly blog on the history of whiskey.”

“I’m surprised that they get any work done with all that compulsive blogging.”

“Ah, to tell you the truth, Doodh, I think most of us—including me—if we were brutally honest, would naturally be terrified of blurting something out to such a vast audience. A million reasons occur to you against doing such a thing, and the benefits seem rather murky. So then, this is what has got me thinking about how fear may be the biggest barrier to the idea we call ‘Mesh More’ collaboration.”

“That, I presume, takes off from Dr Merry Mixer’s Mash Tray and borrows from Chico’s Mash Media blogging?”

“True,” admits Goose, soberly. “We are big-time borrowers in this fast-paced world where nothing original can be spawned any more. But it goes much further. ‘Mesh More’ collaboration is the practice of using the widest net possible in knowledge work. With just a small circle of contacts, all you can get is ‘weak collaboration from a strong group,’ which involves only those people you know. But with the opposite—that is ‘strong collaboration from a weak group,’ or ‘Mesh More,’—you are engaging the power of the Internet to ‘borrow-from-the-world,’ which is a vastly different proposition. The weaker and wider the group, the richer the borrowing.”

“I see. But then, there is the little matter of getting past the fear factor?”

“Exactly. Maybe, however, the remedy is to squash it by degrees.”

“And what does that mean?”

“To overcome the fear of ‘Mesh More’ collaboration, we recommend a stage-wise program. You could start with, say, writing an anonymous comment on a blog. Little risk, but it would get you used to entering into conversation with a blogger. The next step is to post a comment to a blog or ask a question on a forum where you give your name. The earth will continue rotating—and you may actually learn something. You will start to link to others’ blogs and they will link to yours, or you will post questions to a forum or a mailing list. When you are working out an idea, you will just borrow-from-the-world because you soon realize that there are a vast number of wise people out there whom you don’t know.”

“It seems to me that, with a little push from you, we are all ready to get corporations into the biggest ‘Mesh More’ wagon ever, Groucho.”

“You see? What did I tell you about talking to the whole world?”