This article is written by Thom Kearney, a Free Agent in the government of Canada. These are his opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

If you are reading this, you already know that we need to collaborate better.

As public servants, we share wicked problems, complex environments and, most often, a lack of time and resources. It seems a no brainer that if work together we can make better progress collectively than we can alone.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to collaborate across sectors, governments, departments and languages. It can be hard enough to collaborate with those in your own office, not to mention folks in another department or time zone.

In this article I will introduce you to a few tools that I have found most effective since originally logging on to the world wide web in 1993, but first a caveat:

No tool is going to magically make your collaborative experience wonderful. Collaboration is about people working together. You need a common goal, clear communication and a cooperative mindset before any tool will be useful. That said, the tools you choose (or have imposed on you) can make your life much easier or way harder.

I default to an open work style and I think you should too, but everything I work on is unprotected information and there would be no damage should it become public. If you work with protected information you should be aware of the risks and any protocols you need to follow. If you don’t know what protected information is in your context, please find out.

I have selected three common use cases: document creation, distributed meetings, and instant communication. As a public servant, this is where I spend most of my time (as I imagine you do too), so this is where I see the biggest potential for better tools. Starting with the one I used to write this article.

Document creation

Let’s face it, as public servants we produce a lot of documents. They might be text, video, slides or spreadsheets, and they might be policy, regulation or working papers, or it might even be a Team Norms document. But no matter which document it is, there are usually other people involved in the creation and approval.

Your department or agency may have a document management system that claims to support collaboration because others can access your document, check it out, edit it and then check it back in. This set up usually has two fatal flaws.

First people frequently check out a document and then forget to check it back in — thus rendering it read-only. Basically creating friction in the collaboration process. Secondly, all of the government document management systems I have experienced have been within departmental networks and firewalls making them useless for intra-agency collaboration.

If we are not writing document it seems we are having meetings. Sometimes those meetings are about documents

Synchronous editing (e.g. google docs), is waayyy better. If you have never had the joy of seeing an anonymous giraffe exploring your document, call a friend and do it today. If you don't have any friends call me and we can check it out together. I have been using the Google tools extensively over the last 14 months and if you need to co-create text documents, spreadsheets or slides they are pretty awesome. This is a set of tools that really is optimised for collaboration in the cloud. Of course, some people think Google is evil, so...

One open source option alternative is Etherpad and its many offspring. Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention GitHub. If you want to get serious about discussion and governance around the creation or revision of a document like a policy or regulation there is a lot to learn from the folks that collaboratively develop open source software. There is a little bit of vocabulary to learn, (what the hell is a pull request?), but you can do it!

Distributed meetings

If we are not writing document it seems we are having meetings.

Sometimes those meetings are about documents. I am a huge fan of in-person meetings and I think any collaboration should get together in person as often as is reasonable but I also believe that every meeting should welcome distributed participants. There is no reason in our day and age that a meeting should be restricted to those that can be in a single room together.

And if you are working on a multi-agency collaboration it is probably a given that most meetings will be distributed. We have been doing this for years with teleconferences but it is time to step up the game and make web based video conferencing and screen sharing the default. If you are conducting conference calls with presentations you had to email to remote participants, it is time you looked into web conferencing.

I want to encourage all public servants to join Twitter. I think it is the closest thing we have for a global public service serendipity network

In the Government of Canada we have access to web conferencing services provided by WebEx. This might be the only enterprise service that I think is great. Anyone can get an account and provisioning usually takes less than 20 minutes. The cost is invisible to the user. Most departmental networks will support it, even if in some cases you have to use Internet Explorer to do so. The user experience may be less than delightful, but with a little experimentation anyone can do it. Every meeting should be web enabled, and if bandwidth is an issue, turn off the video and just share the screen. I like it when people put the link to their personal room in their email signature — virtual office hours anyone?

There are alternatives to WebEx. I know some people use Zoom, and others use Skype. I am not sure what the open source option would be given that so much is dependant on the bandwidth of the service provider, but I suspect one is out there somewhere.

Instant communication

Have you been Slacked yet? If you are old like me you might remember ICQ, and you almost certainly have used WhatsApp, Messenger or another text service to chat with your friends or your kids. Slack is kind of like those things but focused on a single team. My slack has five teams, one for my current assignment, one for my Free Agent colleagues, and several other interest communities I belong to.

You create an account, join an organisation and voila! you enter a world of emojis and channels. It is pretty awesome for the day to day back and forth between team members, and it also has a zillion integrations with other cloud based tools if you are so inclined. You can share messages directly with other team members and in channels, which are conversation threads that you define. If you want to play it with it yourself, download the app and join one team gov’s slack channel here.

In case you are wondering why is this better than email, it is. For one, it enables open communication because other team members can see into your conversations (unless you make them private). And secondly, it creates a team memory of sorts because the conversations are archived in the channels, so new members can quickly get up to speed. It's not perfect mind you, it can still get pretty busy and confused and the team has to agree how to use it.

The main open source alternative to Slack is RocketChat, which requires a bit more know-how to set up. Some people also use Zoho Connect, and I am certain the Microsoft has something that works great in their universe as well.

Twitter (yes, Twitter)

Lastly, I want to encourage all public servants to join Twitter,. I think it is the closest thing we have for a global public service serendipity network. I first joined Twitter in 2009 in order to connect with an emerging community in the Government of Canada who identified as web 2.0 practitioners. I was an executive at that time and through Twitter, I met hundreds of people that would never be in my network otherwise. Later when I was a consultant again I used twitter for monthly #GovChats with government reformers around the world.  Since then fake news and bots have become a nuisance for some, but I still find my peeps there.

Some of what I am suggesting may run contrary to departmental policy. Sometimes this is for good reason, but often it is just unnecessary friction, left over from a pre-internet era

Find the folks in your field and follow them, follow who they follow, find some relevant hashtags and, if you curate it well, pretty soon your feed will be filled with links to interesting events, podcasts, blogs, videos, papers and websites. An intriguing post, a public exchange, some direct messaging and boom! Now you’re collaborating.

I don’t have an open source option for Twitter, although I am sure there are some platforms that do similar things. The value of something like Twitter is in the network of people, so whatever network will increase the potential for serendipity in your context is where you should go.

Everything is not a nail

Some of what I am suggesting may run contrary to departmental policy.

Sometimes this is for good reason, but often it is just unnecessary friction, left over from a pre-internet era.

You might remember the expression, “if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.  The idea here is that the tools you have access to, shape not only how you go about your work, but how you see the world. Tools that turn your attention into the enterprise narrow your view, and tools that enable global sharing expand it.

If you work in IT, procurement or management you may have the power to impose tools on others. With that power comes the responsibility of understanding how that tool shapes our collective behaviour.  Seriously, if you are a government official with the power to define the tools your people use, use your head.

You know we need to collaborate if we are to have a hope of dealing with the global, national and territorial issues that face us all, the last thing we need is unnecessary rules that get in the way.

The most important tool is between your ears

This article is the result of my ongoing experiment to use the web to create, collaborate and share things. I believe that experimenting with new tools can help you discover new and better ways of working which is what our publics are demanding. I am interested in how the tools enable positive behaviours, not in the tools for their own sake.

The tools mentioned above will not make your collaboration wonderful, people do that.  Remember to communicate, cooperate and commit to your team.

Happy collaborating! — Thom Kearney

(Picture credit: Death to the stock photo)