At the ORG party tonight, William and I got talking about multiple channels of communication, particularly wrt this site - how to manage wiki vs blog vs whatever else comes along.

I recently reviewed Scott Rosenberg’s recent book, Dreaming in Code, for ZDNet (on which site I cannot find the review). The book covers Mitch Kapor’s current project to create a Web-based, open source successor incorporating the spirit of the dear departed Lotus Agenda. One of the issues he raises as a problem for the team working on “Chandler” is that they have so many channels of communication - five mailing lists, an IRC channel, a wiki, several blogs, etc. - that they are confused. What goes where, and if you want to find something, where do you look?

I think this is an increasing problem for people (and for government in determining which interactions are “official” and bear legal weight, and which are/do not). If you have an IM chat with an Inland Revenue official should what he says be as binding as if he said it in his office or on the phone? Is there a hierarchy where one form bears more weight than another? (Written, signed letter - official Web page - phone - email…) Instinctively, it seems to me that we are likely to give the oldest forms of communication the greatest weight, where in many cases what should matter is the greatest certainty that the communication is authorized, knowledgeable, correct, and unadulterated.

There is also the issue of expectations. At my tennis club, everyone is now very confused. They started using email to save money, but where they have everyone’s postal addresses and those notifications always went out universally, not everyone has email, and the mail doesn’t reliably reach some of those who do. Notices on the club bulletin board are only seen by people who already go down to the club (and not always them), and people forget to look at the Web site. It is not in my view reasonable to say, as some do, that

In terms of finding stuff, I suppose you can throw the whole lot - wikis, blogs, web pages, IRC logs, usenet newsgroups - into a big pot and do a search, but this isn’t always the solution either, since to find everything on a particular topic you need people to ensure that all the metadata is consistent - searches will obviously fail if one group calls it a spade and another group calls it a shovel. (Even if neither is correct or both are.)

Somewhere some information science student is writing a PhD on the problems of multi-channel communication.

wg