Group Discussion

Discussion Forum, online discussions, Threaded Discussion, online conferencing, Virtual Community, etc.

• for Real Time, see Live Chat

No technology seems to be optimal for this yet. Here are some things that have been tried.

Wiki: it's hard to track changes/additions/issues needing your attention. It's hard to read through a ThreadMode page. In theory you're supposed to throw away the ThreadMode stuff and refactor periodically into Document Mode. (You could always copy the discussion to a separate page as an archive...)

Wiki with EMail interface (see Zwiki subscriptions): unless each page is kept very granular, many threads carry the same page-title Subject, which makes it very hard to track just specific true threads.

EMail (Email Discussion Beside Wiki)

• the plus: everyone's used to it.

• some apps don't support a threaded view (or the thread view is very clunky). Even if it's there, people don't know to turn it on, if it isn't the default view.

• so everyone sticks with the initial Subject of a given thread, rather than breaking it down into sub-threads when that's appropriate

• so it can be hard to make sure that all the sub-threads get resolved

• unless everyone keeps the entire thread history in each reply, it can be confusing for someone added to a thread after it starts. Even then, it gets messy when 2 people reply to a thread at roughly the same time, so the stream "forks".

• lots of redundancy in storing everyone's pile of messages.

• people don't know how to file messages effectively, so it's hard for them to browse their archives.

• Search Engine-s built into email clients are generally weak and slow, so people hate to use them.

Email List-s

• list per team

• list per project

• list per thread: Round Up

EMail with shared IMAP folders.

NNTP/UseNet: Jon Udell has written piles about this. It seems very promising, except that the browsers (to date) have a horrible problem with their interface. If you link to a single message, the browser returns the message, but with no way to jump to the rest of the thread defining its context; you have to open the whole newsgroup, then search by Subject. I wonder if anyone's considered this for a Mozilla fix?

Web-based tools... see Discussion Forum