email as collaboration; email as social networking
by Tom Mandel
In my last post, I reported on JP Rangaswami’s open email system. By opening his email to his staff, he has essentially created a ‘cost-free’ collaboration forum with no learning curve.
I can easily imagine the value of an email server add-on that would allow anyone to turn any email to which she had access into a message thread. Perhaps something like this exists.
Email has always been collaborative in some sense — that’s what “cc:” is for after all. Open email extends this utility. But there is more one could - and should - do with email.
Because email is chock full of tacit knowledge, it’s an ideal content base for tagging and social networking.
Collaborative groups are pre-defined - as in the case of JP’s staff - and leave little headroom for any ‘emergent’ result. People in the group share collective intelligence and add to it too, within the limits of the group.
But, if email could be tagged, we would share collective intelligence in an even more useful way and would allow people to integrate and extend knowledge by mashing up an even larger variety of sources — including, in this case, what must be the largest unstructured knowledge repository in existence: email.
