Group Therapy

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A wiki is an online site where one or more users can very easily enter or edit information; Wikipedia is the most famous example. Google has given users a limited taste of the wiki approach to collaboration with its Google Docs & Spreadsheets programs, online counterparts to programs like Word and Excel. The documents you create with them are stored in encrypted form on Google’s servers, rather than on your hard drive. You and other people you authorize can log on via any Internet connection to view the documents and make comments or changes—all of them tracked, so everyone can see who has done what. Team members at different sites can all look at the same document at once. (NoteShare, from AquaMinds, is an elegant program that allows Macintosh users to share documents in a wiki fashion.)

The new collaboration tools extend the logic and richness of this process. For instance: Karl Hausker, deputy director of a nonprofit group called the Center for Climate Strategies, explained to me how his organization uses Central Desktop. The organization has more than 20 employees scattered across the United States and Canada. “The torrent of e‑mail pouring into all of our computers was driving us nuts,” he said. “So few people have secretaries anymore, there is no one to turn to when you need to compare calendars or schedule meetings or calls. Pretty soon you have a dozen crisscrossing ‘Reply All’ e-mails to sort through, with little or no indication of their importance or priority.”

Two years ago, Hausker set up a Central Desktop site where team members can log in to check the project calendar, note when they are and aren’t free for meetings or calls, track assigned tasks and mark progress, post reference reports to a common library, and comment on and edit documents, with no confusion about which is the current version. The easiest way to imagine such a workspace is as something like a shared version of Outlook, where members of a team can see not only their own to-do lists, deadlines, and so on but also those of their colleagues. The systems can be arranged to notify members by e‑mail when there is something new for them to do or check. Hausker said that his other team members found the system painless to learn and use, so that now “it is the glue that holds us together.”

Of the systems mentioned here, Basecamp has the most passionate loyalists and, occasionally, detractors; it is to the online-collaboration world what Apple is to computing. Its founder, Jason Fried, now in his early 30s, is a former Web designer who created the program because he was unhappy with the systems available for managing his own projects. “Everything we do starts as a need for our own business,” he told me. “We know that if we need something, a lot of other businesses are likely to need roughly the same thing.” The Basecamp blog, Signal vs. Noise (tinyurl.com/8obl), written by Fried and the other seven members of his company, is a platform for their design concept of elegant minimalism.

Garcia and Hsu are more flexible about adding features to their Central Desktop—for instance, a way you can quickly create a Web conference with other team members when you see that they are online. WebOffice is the most feature-rich and expensive of the three. The cheapest usable version of Basecamp (the free version is extremely limited) is $12 per month; Central Desktop’s is $25, with plenty of online storage; Web­Office’s is $59.95. But the systems have so many varied pricing offers, depending on number of users and amount of storage space (plus other factors), that you should check for yourself. Maybe I can persuade members of my workgroup to start checking too.

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