My kids go to a new school. Like all things new and shiny, there are rough spots. For instance, communications are very, shall we say, ad hoc. It’s a constant flood of information. And it’s a big unmanageable mess.
We did help them set up a school-wide Google Calendar. They handed off updates to another volunteer. A data-entry volunteer is nice (and big props to all them including the ones are at our kid’s school). But, that volunteer isn’t the one who set a deadline, scheduled a skating party or organized the fundraiser. My daughter’s class had their biggest project of the year (a science project) due this week. Well, the school calendar actually showed the wrong date. Oops. The volunteer enters a lot of events and the volunteer doesn’t own most of those events so it’s easy to end up a calendar that isn’t accurate or up-to-date. Aka: the calendar no one uses.
The people who own something need to drive the communications about it. They’re the ones who are supposed to care. They need to have the authority and responsibility to get the word out.
Ever year, the school releases a parent phone book. They wait for all the parents to send in their latest info, turn in the I want-to/don’t-want-to be included form and then someone slowly enters all the information. This year, it just arrived; two-thirds of the year is gone.
I’ve learned that sending out birthday invitations for my daughter’s December birthday is very hit and miss. Without tons of warning, calling parents and son, the invitations get ignored in the holiday crush. This time, I had to use last year’s directory. Many parents had changed numbers. New students weren’t listed yet. There was even a case where the parent who had custody last year didn’t even have regular contact with the child this year. Friends at the party? Two.
It’s an example of the Office nail problem. Almost everyone uses Microsoft Office: Excel Spreadsheets, Word Documents, Power Point Presentations. All of those are useful, but not every problem is a nail to Offices’s hammer. When different bits and pieces change all the time, that information is updated in an adhoc basis, etc., you never have a finished document. Instead of that, why doesn’t it get published on the school’s website?
At the front end of the process, why not give parents the ability to update it, whenever they need, on the school’s website? When a parent gets a new phone number, they change it and everyone sees it instantly. Granted there will still be special cases, but the vast majority of the work can be handled by the people who own the information.
Office was built with the idea that one person builds a document, edits it, polishes it, sends it out and it’s done. Multiple people working together? Bigger outfits will use Sharepoint. Most small businesses and schools uses email. Which is really a way of saying one person does the work. Who that one person changes moment to moment. And, if they’re a volunteer and disappear, there went all the work back to whatever version you can find. If you can. But, somehow you get it out. Need to update it? For everyone else, it’s not really an update. It’s a whole new document. Who’s got the old copies? How do we get them all to replace it with the new one?
Office is still a tool that is built around a one person, linear create, edit, publish and be done model.
For several projects in the world of writing and publishing, we’re experimenting with ripping up that old model. We’re developing a model where a “book” might exist as many different pieces: chapters, poems, articles, introductions, dictionary entries. And those pieces exist in many different systems including Google Docs. Instead of pouring all that stuff into a program like Indesign, Quark, PageMaker, DreamWeaver or Publisher, we design how the pieces will be brought together. In the case of the Dictionary project, thousands of entries from five different sources are pulled in, organized and published automatically. They can be published as print booklets, PDFs, Kindle Books, Print on Demand books, etc.,
Getting an update out means clicking “Publish”. The distance between writing and finished product goes from years (in the old days) or months (in the case of the school phone book) to seconds.
What if that publish button had a couple of boxes next to it where you could type in a short announcement (for a tweet) and a longer announcement (for everywhere else) and where-to-announce checkboxes (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, GooglePlus, your mailing list, etc.).
All of a sudden, the distance between your work (on one hand) and publishing and telling people about it (on the other) is close to zero.