I had a brief but compelling chat with Eugene Kim a couple of days back. Eugene is cofounder of Blue Oxen Associates, a think tank that works on improving collaboration. He personally works a good deal on open source and interoperability and has cocreated PurpleWiki, an open source collaborative tool. Eugene will be speaking at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference on 'How to Collaborate Without Really Trying' and will be moderating two other very interesting panels. His speech will definitely bring to light the problems that often come with complex and expensive collaboration tools. He'll be going over some lightweight and open source tools that can offer simple ways to streamline collaboration efforts.

From my conversation with him, I can tell that Eugene is a huge proponent of simplicity. If you only need a piece of paper, then just go ahead and use that piece of paper rather than buying a complex and cumbersome tool. In fact, when I asked Eugene what his favourite collaborative tool was, he unhesitatingly said "a piece of paper." It really can be that simple. Sketch, jot down, pass around. Easy.

I like how Larry defined the issue in his last post on CTC: "Collaboration is how we work together. Collaborative technologies present opportunities to work together more effectively." Though the opportunity may be present to optimize workflow, at the same time it can also hinder it. Sometimes, as Eugene noted, a piece of paper can still be a powerful collaborative tool.

Aside from paper, Eugene strongly believes in the power of wikis. They are a very simple tool to use, manage and learn. I think online collaboration, personally, is more powerful for one simple reason: links. Files and ideas can be linked together in ways that you cannot always do otherwise. I was surprised to hear that Eugene thinks that we could actually be seeing some good lightweight tools from Microsoft. I've had some bad Microsoft collaboration experiences just due to the amount of work it took to manage. So, we'll have to see. Other cool tools: TWiki, del.icio.us, Jotspot, Socialtext, and RSS feeds. For those of you wondering, we did have our conversation via Skype - how's that for collaboration.

So, if there are easy tools out there, how does collaboration go so wrong so often? Well, you've got pressure from IT and finance, constrained thinking office-wide about what constitutes a collaborative/social tool, and then you have the whole stigma around collaborative technologies that are actually inexpensive: people just don't take them seriously simple because they are affordable. Go figure.

Continue reading my article over on the Collaborative Technologies Conference Blog.