What if all engineers within a company were given a new email address when they started, and were told “just use it for business” and “please note that everything that you do in email is in public view. In order to prevent embarassing moments, please keep matters of your personal privacy OUT of your assigned email box; use Groove for private matters. Oh, and by the way, here are the URLs of all of your team members’ mailboxes, in case you care. Oh, and by the way, here’s a site where you Google across all of them. Oh, also, I should mention that we never delete any email, by policy.”
John Seely Brown in Forbes
“Let’s look at email. Email plays quite different roles than it did five years ago. Email has started to seriously change hierarchy. It keeps you more aware of the edge of what’s happening in your company. You can sense the heartbeat of the organization when you skim the messages. It’s
like reading body language: The velocity of [email] messages, the rhythms tell you something. You’re beginning to read the context of email technology rather than merely the technology. You become “attuned to” rather than “attend to.” Almost all our technology has been designed around the theme that you have to attend to it. How do you survive an information overload? You’re attuning to all sorts of things that you may then choose to attend to.”
At first, the question posed by Ray Ozzie sounds a lot like a description of a newsgroup or a mailing list: it’s publicly viewable yet still person to person or person to group.
What if all the conversations over email were public (and this excludes having a rogue sysadmin sending juicy bits from management emails to his friends at other companies)? Everyone would know about the issues surrounding a project or customer.
As Linus Torvalds has been quoted, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” This describes the opposite of what happens in a meeting-centric culture, as opposed to a knowledge-centric. The meeting’s attendees will iinclude all the same people who have been working on the problem individually or in smaller groups. If instead the conditions and circumstances of the problem or issue were accessible by everyone across an organization, you have more, not fewer, minds at work.