Good Enough Is Not Enough: A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it. "Society's problems are scaling at unprecedented rates, so solutions need to scale also. Our very survival depends on our ability to work together more effectively, to get collectively smarter. Computers -- when used properly -- can help us do this." Our software tools -- particularly in the collaboration space -- are nowhere close to fulfilling their potential. I can walk into any meeting anywhere in the world with a piece of paper in hand, and I can be sure that people will be able to read it, mark it up, pass it around, and file it away. I can't say the same for electronic documents. I can't annotate a Web page or use the same filing system for both my email and my Word documents, at least not in a way that is guaranteed to be interoperable with applications on my own machine and on others. Why not? In order to make a real impact in the collaborative space, tools must not only be good, they must be interoperable. Improving collaborative tools, then, boils down to this: We must be people-centric when designing and building applications, and we must work with other developers to make our tools more interoperable.