Full Circle Associates

Dina Mehta and Alex Mack
Accelerating Collaboration with Social Tools

How we collaborated on a project across international boundaries. Originated in Pitney Bowes. Alex based in an R&D group0. Teams in US and India. Use team need to “see” and “hear”. We work as a design firm. Go out collect ethnographic data, bring in back and brainstorm, develop test and refine. We consider ourselves and innovation unit rather than a design unit. Looking for bigger ideas.

This project was our first project outside the US. Not only based outside US in India, and a broad strategic questions – how can PB create value for postal and financial institutions in rural and urban India. Big. I’m an anthropologist with field work experience in India and the rest of the team did not. We did want to maintain or philosophies and methodologies. Observational fieldwork, brainstorming, prototyping. We wanted to be there. But important to have researchers on the ground, from India, who know the culture and insights. So hired Dina to do most of the fieldwork for us. But not all. We felt important for US team members to spend time in India. Outsiders can have some insights. Pictures of range of where we worked. Post offices in rural and urban India.

Started off by going to India to learn each other’s methods of working, F2f, WEEKLY protocols for phone calls, email, pictures, weekly written report. There were time lags and misunderstandings. Dina pushed us to work through those.

Dina – Not going to go into what a blog is. We set up a blog for the project. Briefly a space available online to publish. Publishing tool. It is one that becomes and exchange space for a team working together. You can build a community around your blog. IN this case what worked was that we set it up after about a year in the project. (Had some security issues). Password protected blog. One of the big benefits – it did not replace other forms, like email, but it cut it down. It enhanced the communication. Our weekly phone calls were more productive beyond reporting. We could brainstorm, take things further, plan better in our calls. The other big advantage was we could get to the same wavelength quicker. Would not have to wait for weekly reports. I’d come back from fieldwork and put information right in. What we did, what we could do better. Giving each other constant feedback with the comments on the blog posts. All this gets recorded chronologically ordered, searchable archive. Spaces which existed as our archive. We posted as separate authors. If you look at the left hand (screen shot) there are categories that emerged as the work went on. Advantage of this space. Could upload pictures, conversations in the comments were of great values. Separate strands which were searchable. It was a chaotic informal spontaneous intuitive exercise. In that there was wonder and creativity. It was a very decentralized self organizing system that organized around the work.

Blogs do have weaknesses. No threading in comments. We had some issues with printing. But Pitney Bowes hired some tech support to fix those problems. Also used other tools. We used Skype a lot. Simple internet telephony. Brought immediate and real time interaction. With Skype you have online presence indicators. Alex could see when I was online. She could ask a quick clarifying question. Ping me and chat for a minute, handle issues at that point in time. Also developed the paper on a wiki. Wikpedia is a good example. There’s tagging and other examples.

How important that PB spent time in India and did field work. (See slides). On engineer said “before I went to India I had a good mental pictures. Conversations with people weren’t different the things I found different were the day-to-day life. … See paper.”

The day-to-day life is important context for innovation and design.

(Dina, can I interview you on this while you are in Seattle?)

Categories: EPIC2005, collaboration, socialsoftware