How to Communicate

The working titles of this document included "How to talk to people effectively" and "How not to be a complete waste of air or electrons".

This article is not about how to communicate with your lover, or how to communicate with your father, mother, doctor, priest, whatever. Go watch Oprah for that kind of junk. This is about getting your message across electronically in the most effective and least annoying method possible.

For previously discussed reasons, instant messaging remains at best poorly engineered, if not totally misguided.

A lot of people communicate with the world through email lists and instant messaging. The entire communication model employed by both approaches is incredibly clumsy and ineffective. It is perhaps not the instant messaging clients themselves that present the problem, but rather the very concept they encompass.

Here's a diagram and points to illustrate what I mean.



Email and IM are very unnatural

Email and instant messaging actually don't do an exceptionally great job of disseminating information to concerned parties. They don't mimic how people actually convey information in a group setting. Both protocols are exclusive by default, meaning the entire platform is geared to leave people in the dark unless explicity brought into the dialogue.

This allows for information that is very relevant to you and your work to be absolutely irretrievable. Joe Schmo didn't know that you needed to know, so he didn't loop you in.

If acted out in some sort of dramatic way, messaging in these methods would be akin to everyone standing in a large room with tape over their mouths, silently passing notes to each other. Somebody in the room could have the answer to your problem, but without composing a very politically incorrect spam message you'd never know it.

Email and IM have no permanence

Mailing lists do reach a wide variety of readers, however they lack the ability to create any sort of digestable information. Organizations NEVER create good documentation as all information is conveyed by a blizzard of emails. In a corporate setting, new hires are often up the creek without a paddle as there exists absolutely zero recent information presented in a somewhat logical manner.

If you have ever received a company how-to or policy guide by way of email, your company knows absolutely nothing about synchronization. Two months to a year down the road, a newcomer will want to read that document. They will have to find somebody with a copy of that document in their inbox because the half-motivated individual that wrote it has inevitably left the company for bigger and better things.

Your inbox is always in a state of flux. Your important data is saved amongst spam advertising. The definition of spam does includes all marketing, even if said marketing originates from within your organization. The biggest productivity killer of all time is internal mass emailing. Emails from executives have the same effect as if the execs would stop by at every desk in the company and talk the employee's ear off for 5 minutes. The fact of the matter is, your inbox is a minefield for important information. How do you expect it to survive?

Email and IM create a lot of chatter

With every Outlook-addicted company, there is a crazy Exchange server administrator somewhere. Inevitably, the mail server will fill up and the administrator will go apeshit, asking people to locally archive their messages. Sure, this problem could be solved rather easily by adding more diskspace, but with more diskspace comes more usage - bigger attachments and whatever else. In any case, your IT department probably wants to carry out the suicide pact (Figure 1) as mixing up some interesting punch would produce less of a headache than supporting a bunch of people drunk on email.

The Solution

Goal: You want to create and disseminate meaningful information such as guides, policies and events to many people and make sure they will read it.

Setup a damn Wiki. Do not forward stupid word docs or PDFs to the entire world. Not only will people be able to read your information without extra software, but they would be able to painlessly add information to the document if you allowed them to. New people joining the group are referred to the Wiki for information. There the information would exist as dynamic and as up-to-date as possible while still remaining in a single location - effectively set in stone for all users.

Receiving emails with the usual drab is the equivalent of receiving last year's catalogue, where the Wiki is like putting up a billboard the size of the moon and sticking your message on it. With diligent editing of the wiki, information conveyed will not be subject to doubt of its relevance in the present time.

Goal: You want to informally discuss topics with people.

Join or create an IRC channel related to the topic. Think less of which people you'd like to talk to but more about the topics you may want to talk about. This could be anything from gardening to golf to what-the-hell-are-we-doing-friday-night.

IRC is preferred over IM for a number of reasons:

• Its inclusive nature.
  Anybody that wants to know isn't left out of the discussion. It provides a good environment to meet people with similar interests. Contrast this to the typical IM conversation with somebody new (or somebody that totally forgot who you were) which is more than a little bit hostile. If you don't believe me, add a few people you don't know to your contact list.


• Multi-platform support.
  It does not matter if you're running Windows, Mac OS, Linux or whatever - if your computer is connected to the internet, you can connect to IRC.


• Collective Information and Learning
  This does not mean the Borg nor does it mean Hooked On Phonics. It means if you say "Meet at 6 at the theatre" you don't have to repeat yourself and the people that have learned this information can then disseminate this information themselves, as described in the next point.


• Distributed load.
  Instant messaging, with its in-your-face dialogs, forces you to give every message you receive your full attention followed by a quick reply. This works well if you're a nonproductive bonehead (Note: I'm not claiming to not have ever been a procrastinator myself). IRC provides a system where messages by default are presented in a manner that allows them to be replied to by any participant in the discussion. You do not have to actively participate in every discussion that takes place, even if the creator of the message wished you to field the query.


• Less typing, more talking.
  If you use IRC for any length of time, you will discover that not only are you no longer clicking furiously but also not typing as much. Repetition of phrases is less likely if not completely nonexistent. If I had a dollar for every MSN window that read "whats up?" to which I replied "not much" for lack of interest of writing a longer story, I'd be a fucking billionaire. IRC eliminates these messages as that anybody who is literate can read and see that you've already answered somebody that has presented a similar question.

Now, this all does not mean that I disregard email and IM entirely. They are useful, but they exist solely as a fallback, especially in regard to IM. Do not abandon these things entirely, but simply add IRC and Wikipedia on your list of things to use more.

Do it. Do it.