Invitations and Becomings

One by-product of a recent debate about email's compatibility or incompatibility with wikis is that we can begin to understand not only weaknesses as a medium of collaboration, but also its strengths.

I've been lurking around - and occasionally posting to - the technical team's mailing list at work. My company, Axe, attracts some really great talent, not only from Australia but around the world, and I've been really impressed by both the depth of knowledge and the accessibility of the senior developers that is demonstrated on a daily basis.

As someone who's interested in knowledge management, it made me wonder how much of this know-how would be lost if just one of these senior guys were to leave.

So, couple of days ago I posted the following question on LinkedIn:

What's the best way to capture knowledge shared via a company email list?

Does anyone have any advice about how best to integrate an email list with an enterprise wiki? For example, is it worthwhile dumping a weekly or monthly archive of list postings onto a separate wikipage, making those emails searchable? Will people search it first before pinging the list again, and is there any way to encourage people to turn that dump into effective wiki content, e.g. by aggregating the best responses on related topics, even though they may be weeks, months or years apart?

A little verbose, perhaps, but I've had a pretty good response already (you can see the thread here). And these responses have fallen into two distinct camps:

1) Those who see wikis as replacing email

2) Those who see wikis as complementing email

Both sides make excellent points. The first group argues that while a wiki is a much better way of capturing and grooming knowledge, it can't really get off the ground unless email use is ruled out, or at least restricted. The second group points out that replacing email with a wiki goes against the natural form of collaboration, and so can actually get in the way of an otherwise thriving community.

Naturally, I want to split the difference. I don't think that the two points of view are mutually exclusive, provided we make a clear distinction between knowledge exchange and knowledge capture. If you prefer, though, the same distinction can be articulate in terms of expression and registration - or even communication and memory. Take your pick.

How does this help? Well, it's a matter of an appropriate division of labour.

Email is great for communication, expression or exchange, but it's really terrible for capturing or registering structured information or developing corporate memory. We're so familiar with email that we still tend to assume that just because we can search our inbox archive, we possess its contents. But the fact of the matter is that we don't possess these in any meaningful sense. For one thing, the contents are strongly context-specific, and no attempt has been made to generalise them. For another, sitting in an archive they can't inspire anyone to critique or clarify them further. In other words, past email correspondence very quickly becomes parochial and stale.

On the other hand, wikis are great for not only capturing, registering and remembering information, but also keeping that information fresh and relevant, not least by being perpetually editable. However, wikis tend to conceal the collaborative labour that sustains them. You can hear the hum of a vibrant mailing list, but you only ever see the tracks that wiki participants leave behind. Browsing a wiki, it's easy to get the sense that everything important happens off-scene, or finished happening just before you arrived.

Email exists almost entirely in the present, so much so that when it slips into the past, it... well, let's just say email doesn't age gracefully. Wikipages, by contrast, exist in the recent past, and - like teenagers - are constantly, desperately trying to catch up to the present, which makes them animated and open-ended, if always a little alienated.

I suppose the point of all this is that in a world with more diverse forms of collaboration, we can start to ask questions about traditional forms, like email, that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago - when we acted as though working together was synonymous with talking to each other.

The challenge is to recognize email's strengths, and say definitively what email is for. Only that way can we avoid the false dilemma: wiki or email.

So, what is email actually good for?

In a slogan: exchanges and emergencies. If you're using it for something else, there's probably a better medium at your disposal.