Project collaboration software is (now) widely available. What advantages does blogging offer over these alternatives?

While project collaboration tools have been around for over ten years (Lotus Notes) the use of those tools has produced mixed results. For the most part I see this as matters of the design team practices and the inertia of individual habits. Teams are together for relatively short times. Further, many team members only participate for part of the life of the project. I don’t see team leaders taking the time to design (declare) the practices for coordination and the following discipline to carry out the designs. This holds for formal collaboration environments as well as the informal blogging environment.

One further note…so much of what we see in collaboration tools comes from the management as problem-solving or management as decision-making paradigm. While it’s true that the collaboration tools can be used in ways more in line with a linguistic action perspective, they tend not to be used that way. I think this has to do with our commonsense. You see we share a commonsense that is all wrapped-up in the pursuit of optimal circumstances — the one right way — that conforms to the paradigm above. People need help engaging in a different way, a way that embraces our humanness without throwing away the best of the other paradigm.

I intended to provide exactly that help in my Proposal for a P-Log Specification.