Virtual collaboration tools

I’ve spent a while over the last day or two trying to coordinate a conference call as an alternative to a 350km rail journey and a face-to-face meeting - so I’m currently acutely aware of the limitations of virtual collaboration.

Dave Pollard has put together a matrix of collaborative tools, their advantages and disadvantages and the type of collaboration that they’re best suited to - which is a useful summary if you’re trying to work out what kind of collaborative nail you’re attempting to bang in with an online hammer. There’s no shortage of resources expounding on why tool X is the best way of doing Y, but what makes this resource useful is the listing of both upsides and downsides.

According to Dave, collaborative nirvana will look something like this:

I am confident that, as bandwidth and processing power continue to expand, we will soon see:

• A single, free, reliable, easy-to-use, professional-looking application that will provide what I’ve called Simple Virtual Presence — the four applications listed… plus the option of videoconferencing
• A simple, free, easy-to-use collaboration space where the results of the online collaboration sessions, and a library of relevant resources and links, are stored, with wiki-like capability so it can be maintained by any and all in the group.

Actually, it’s probably not too far away if you’re happy to mix-and-match tools that are already available - but based on the description above the Open University Knowledge Media Institute might already be most of the way there with FlashMeeting. Add something like SocialText to the mix, and the end result starts to look promising.

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