

Bottom-up collaboration in the construction industry - Competing with email - swombat
http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0017-construction-collaboration.html

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jlangenauer
I think the thing that needs to be realised is that online collaboration is
not merely the same as file sharing - particularly in the construction
industry.

It's only at certain small parts of the overall construction process (from
design through construction and then commissioning) that "collaboration" can
be reduced to distributing files: typically where the files in question are
"Issued for Construction" or "Issued for Review" - the formal gates in the
process.

The rest of the time, as the documents are developed, and interpreted,
collaboration (particularly in an online sense) means that additional
information needs to be conveyed with the drawings to provide context and/or
revision without the formal issue of a new revision of a drawing or document,
or even a redline markup.

Some examples of these sorts of situations: \- Where as-built changes (i.e.
where changes have been made on site from the "approved" drawings) need to be
incorporated into drawings which are then handed over with the completed
project \- When a drawing needs to be clarified between site and the design
office. \- Where a contractual clause needs to be varied on a subcontract,
because both parties agree it might be mutually beneficial to do so. \- Where
a initial draft of a drawing needs to accept the input from multiple
engineering disciplines in order to produce a final drawing.

These situations - which are, by far, the most common type of situations in
construction - are ones where the transfer of documents is insufficient to
communicate the context and changes which another person needs to understand
to provide input. These are the situations where email comes into its own on
the construction project - particularly if done through a document control
system so the audit trail is established.

I think the future of construction collaboration will look a lot more like
Google Wave than DropBox. Until then, email will hold an important role in any
construction project - despite it being a shitty medium to share controlled
documents, but because it can surround those documents with further
information and context in the easiest way possible.

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robryan
It also depends if your trying to attempt some collaboration for a short
period of time, most people would rather not have to learn a new system for a
short/ small project.

Everyone has an email and is comfortable with it, it may be hard to convince
non tech people that a web collaboration tool is the way to go.

There is a lot of upside to them, with time I guess collaboration methods
other than email will become common, especially with Google Wave on the way.

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jrnkntl
Nice write-up and in the end everyone needs to admit that email is still the
way most people go; even if it is just to tell them that they need to log in
to the online collab tool because there has something changed.

One question I have though is how far you have to go with -not- preventing
user's mistakes. I miss some concrete examples (except for the Little Britain
sketch).

~~~
swombat
Some examples from Woobius:

\- Construction collaboration is all about official issues of files (i.e. "I
issue these 10 files to you for comment"). We make it easy to fix an issue
after it's happened, if there were errors in the issue.

\- If you're invited to the wrong company, you can easily be moved to the
right company

\- If someone named your company incorrectly when they invited you, you can
rename your company

etc.

~~~
jrnkntl
Ok thanks for the clarification; comes down to that it's more about offering
flexibility afterwards then "fixed mistake checking" before.

~~~
swombat
Yes, that's exactly it.

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physcab
One immediate thought I had about the e-mail problem is how online-dating
sites deal with it.

Now, I realize online collaboration is completely different user motivation.
Online dating preys upon a somewhat already-desperate userbase.

But it's also genius how they deal with the e-mail problem. For example, with
Ok Cupid, they include a giant one-click "Login" link with e-mail updates.
There's no password re-entry. With other sites, they send you just enough
information about a connection that makes you want to sign back in again, but
not enough information to let you contact that other person directly via
e-mail.

