How can community software help Human Resources team

This is an excerpt from what SocialText says HR can do with community software. "They (HR) can engage employees in highly active, ongoing conversations, and create a more open, transparent, and trusting culture. Employees in new or changed roles quickly see what others are working on, discover others who might be important to them, and learn from documented best practices of their colleagues. People can jump into conversations underway, and tap into corporate memory to quickly absorb the history of important topics. With rich profiles that let colleagues get to know each other better, ambient awareness of what others are working on, and the means to discover social networks, trust levels rise and the culture shifts to one of strong teamwork and independent thinking."

It is interesting that SocialText still refers to their software as collaboration software and not community software. May be the word collaboration is better understood than the word community. One of my colleagues from work told me yesteday that the "potential for collaboration is inherent to community but you do not necesserily achieve or enable community in collaboration".

Pbwiki's Free 2GB Wiki

PB Wiki now gives a free 2GB site which you can use for collaborative content creation. It is a great tool that can be applied to many development situations. Content developers can use the site to script content. Software development teams can share their specifications and use cases. Quality teams can keep track of their issues and status. Great tool. I hope pbwiki succeeds in their efforts of providing simple collaboration tools.

Writing Effective Use Cases By Alistair Cockburn

A few months back I read the book 'Writing Effective Use Cases' by Alistair Cockburn. I like his classification of use cases as CLOUD, KITE, SEA, FISH and CLAM. Simple yet very effective way to discuss a use case. It is very easy to say "Oh! I think it is a clam" to your team mate, rather than saying "I think that is too detailed". The approach works well for collaboration over the phone.

Use Cases As Social Objects

I now manage a product that has team members in California, Germany and India. We started posting our use cases in our internal wiki so that everyone in the team can see the list of use cases we have. We slowly expanded the use cases over 10 different discussions and evolved it with user interface screens, questions from developers, comments from product managers and so on. Such a collaboration is enhancing the value of the information in the use case. It is also bringing the team closer to a common understanding of what we are building. I will provide more updates on this.

You Tube Videos In My Blog

Added YouTube Videos on Web 2.0 to my blog today. I am displaying videos tagged with the key word Web 2.0 now. I think Web 2.0 tools play a key role in distributed teams. Hence the interest.

Added Twitter feeds as well. Since I send tweets using my mobile phone while I am listening to a presentation or reading an article outside at a cofee shop, I think it is good way to share my quick thoughts.