Online Collaboration Tools and Practices You Can Use Today
Online Collaboration
Tools and Practices You Can Use Today
Long before the term “social media” entered our vocabulary, pioneers of several early online communities gained a tremendous amount of first-hand knowledge about potential uses and misuses of electronic tools for discussions, collaboration, and research. Institute for the Future was one such pioneer, having built the first online teleconferencing system, appropriately called Forum, for the purpose of bringing experts together to come up with future forecasts. It then went on to create a project called Groupware (1988) specifically focused on studying how people collaborate in connected electronic environments and what tools and practices would help them do so most effectively. The WELL (1985), an online community where people shared thoughts and advice on everything from tick bites to marriage and coding, thrived. The knowledge from these early electronic communities about what it takes to create, manage, and sustain online societies sadly has been lost or largely ignored by the current generation of social media platforms. However, today we need it more than ever before. As we enter an era when virtual work, virtual teams, and virtual classrooms have to be the primary mode of interaction, IFTF wants to bring back and share this knowledge widely for today and tomorrow’s users.
Institute for the Future has been a pioneer in creating and analyzing the best tools and processes for online collaboration. In this series, we will continue to invite experts from IFTF and our community to share perspectives on that will help you, your co-workers, and your families stay connected and productive during this period of required "social distancing."
ARCHIVED EPISODES
EPISODE 5
Online Collaboration
The Great Communications Hackathon
Featuring Toshi Hoo
Thursday, May 14, 2020
9:00am PT
IFTF Emerging Media Lab Director Toshi Anders Hoo joins Mark Frauenfelder to explore the future of human communication, collaboration and connection through emerging media technologies. The covid-19 pandemic has instigated an unprecedented global experiment as people around the world try to figure out how to translate their social, personal, and professional lives into the constraints of online tools and networks. The EML is looking both at the urgent futures during this forced global hackathon, as well as the long-term futures of social virtual reality platforms where people will be embodied as 3D avatars and inhabit shared virtual worlds.
This discussion mentions the following resources:
Online Town - Virtual conversations
Half Life: Alyx - New AAA VR game
Jessica Outlaw - Social VR culture and behaviour research
Stonehenge Summer Ritual Live Stream
12M people attend Travis Scott's Live Concert in Fortnite
John Legend performs in VR in WaveXR
People are making a living in Animal Crossing
China retailers blocking Animal Crossing after pro-Hong Kong protests in virtual islands
New forms of protest and activism in online and virtual worlds
Supernatural - VR Workouts
For more from IFTF's Emerging Media Lab
EPISODE 4
Online Collaboration
Crowdsourcing Safety in Times of Crisis
Featuring Tara Brown of SafeCast
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
IFTF's Mark Frauenfelder joined Tara Brown, technologist, STEAM educator, and author developing programs at the intersection of environment, education, and well-being, for a conversation about the new values of technologies that connect us in uncertain times.
This discussion mentions the following resources:
SAFECAST
Citizen Sensing on FutureNOW Magazine
Crap Detection Mini-Course, from Howard Rheingold
Forest Bathing (Shin-rin Yoku)
EPISODE 3
Online Collaboration
The Future of Remote Working
Featuring Stephane Kasriel
Wednesday, March 25, 9am PT
If you strive to make tools for remote work that reflect in-person experiences of work, you will always fall short. We need to look to the future, and build tools that will harness the best of what virtual work can provide.
Remote working tools that Stephane Kasriel mentioned during our conversation:
Asana, Basecamp, Yes, Loom, Miro, Remote HQ, Slack, Superhuman, Tandem, TelePresence, and Trello.
Stephane just read: Who Gets What ? and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin Roth.
EPISODE 2
Online Collaboration Series: Being There Without Being There
Featuring Bob Johansen
March 19, 2020 at 9am PT
Join IFTF for episode 2 of the IFTF Online Collaboration Series, featuring IFTF Distinguished Fellow, Bob Johansen, hosted by Mark Frauenfelder, where they will discuss the roots of online collaborative platforms, including uses, misuses, and the lessons learned for today's distributed world.
Bob will share insights from his studies over the years of a wide range of options for meetings at a distance. What can we learn about how to have great presence--even when we can't be present physically?
For further reading on the topics Bob and Mark will discuss, explore these titles:
Electronic Meetings (with Jacques Vallee and Kathi Vian), 1978
Teleconferencing and Beyond, 1984
Groupware, 1988
Leading Business Teams, 1991
The New Leadership Literacies, 2017
The Uncanny Valley, by Masahiro Mori (1970)
YoYo Ma plays cello on Twitter
EPISODE 1
Online Collaboration: Tools and Practices You Can Use Today
There is no better person to kickstart the series than the IFTF Distinguished Fellow Howard Rheingold, author of several bestselling books on the subject, among them The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs, and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, a pioneer of peeragogy, an online peer learning methodology, a teacher of social media issues and literacies at UC Berkeley and Stanford, a technology pioneer, a futurist, and an artist. In this and webinars to follow, we will begin to surface and compile the lore that expert practitioners possess in regard to how to convene online meetings, conferences, and courses.
Hosted by Mark Frauenfelder, Howard Rheingold discuss online learning, work, and social communities.