Chapter 21. Teams and Tools

Karl Fogel

THIS CHAPTER IS RELEASED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 3.0 LICENSE (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

This chapter is about the transformative effect that good tools can have on a team's ability to collaborate.

Consider that for years the World Wide Web consisted mainly of static pages that required technical expertise to write, and that readers could not influence except by sending email to the appropriate webmaster@ address. Then, a few visionary souls started making software that would allow anyone with basic computer skills to cause text to appear on the Web, and other software to allow readers to comment on or even edit those pages themselves. Nothing about blogs or wikis was technically revolutionary; like the fax machine, they could have been invented years earlier, if only someone had thought of them. Yet once they appeared, they greatly increased people's ability to organize themselves into productive networks.

This chapter tells three stories about how good tools (or the lack of them) made a difference to a team. The tools discussed here are much narrower in scope than blogs and wikis, but their specificity makes them well suited to teasing out some principles of collaboration tools. As my experience has mostly been with open source software projects, that's what I'll draw on, but the same principles are probably applicable to any collaborative endeavor.

How Open Source Projects Work

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