Knowledge Sharing

This past weekend I raced in the 24 Hours Summer Solstice Mountain Bike race at Albion Hills. My midnight lap in the rain made for a weekend of ridiculous fun I'm already looking forward to enjoying again next year.

Part of my prep was to visit a local bike shop (KamikazBikes.com) to get a new seat post and neck extension  for my new front shock (I'm a bit rough on my gear). The center of the bike shop is a workshop that serves as both the social center of the store, as well as the center of learning and knowledge sharing within their bike mechanic community.

The more I look, the more I find that successful businesses always include a social center for learning and knowledge sharing. While this presents a challenge for geographically separated teams working on shared projects, it remains an important (dare I say critical) component of successful projects.

The challenge presented to many companies that are working on shared projects over large distances is the inability to sit in the same room as they collaborate to learn and grow. Ian and I faced this challenge in earnst when we started work on Nethomeweb.com in early 2004. At the time we were both serving as engineers in Canada's military and we were almost never within 1000 miles of each other. We spent hours of our evenings and weekends coding, learning, and collaborating to build a complex social community entirely over the net. The challenge only increased as we added other members to the development team.

Suffice it to say that we spent an enourmous amount of time investing in collaboration and knowledge sharing best practices purely out of necessity.

Today we almost take for granted our efficiency working with multiple grounps and multiple projects that are spread over a myriad of geographical locations. As I write this Ian is working with a client using a shared desktop and skype to achieve an online collaborative work environment.

In today's global workplace, working with clients and co-workers from remote locations usually is less a luxury and more a requirement. If you're looking for information about the tools, mashups, and E2.0 solutions we both use and install everyday, contact us and we'll schedule a time to discuss.