Hardware of the Human Mind

I contributed to a Google wave with some coworkers discussing how we could use this fascinating tool more effectively.  It’s definitely a shiny new toy right now.  I hope we can figure out how to use it in our workflows, but there’s definitely some rough edges.  Here’s my current observations direct from the wave:

It’s clear though, the the hyper-threaded nature of Google Wave has human comprehension limits. Kurt and I were just discussing offline that one of the best features of “Wikis” as we currently use now–they encourage moderation. We use it effectively for things like the release plans.  Anyone can add whatever they want, but the “owner” will keep house.

The problem we have with our waves now…the signal to noise ratio gets low REALLY fast. There’s simple noise like “me too” replies, or jokes. We can agree not to do that. But even with substantive discussion, following the flow of the conversation asynchronously doesn’t scale on the hardware of the human mind.

It works fine if everyone is in the wave watching it evolve in real time. It’s even fun! But let it sit for a few days with 10 people tossing in one off blips here and there…it’s hard to catch up with the context. Sure, the “context” is there, but human minds have to “context switch” and read back a bit to understand the new blips that come through. There needs to be some sort of pruning/summary convention that we use to keep these clean.

One feature of the wave client that would help this–Google could offer a “select this entire thread” and then let you remove it. The “moderator” can then summarize the decision somewhere, either in a new reply thread, or in the top blip so it acts like the “document”.

A lot of human convention will need to emerge for us to make this tool work.