XplanaZine

Let’s face it. You can lead a person to the collaboration trough but you can’t make them participate in our online communities. At least that has been our experience in the first waves of Web communities. It has lead to a different kind of digital divide, one that separates people who use Web technology into active and passive camps.

There are many factors, of course, that cause people to feel uncomfortable with participating in Web communities. Some of these factors are social or psychological, but others are actually technological in nature — lack of bandwidth, processing power, software etc.

One of the major technological obstacles to online participation, I believe, is that people have difficulty parting with the feel and comfort of their traditional tools of productivity. There are many people, for example, who are extremely comfortable and productive with desktop computing technology who have never adjusted to the synchronous possibilities and pressures of the Web. Publishers are extremely sensitive to this. When new textbooks are being considered for release, they still debate the costs of producing CD ROMs to accompany them. Although the CD ROM materials can be put on the Web, the publishers are concerned about bandwidth accessibility for students and, just as important, the fact that the asynchronous, desktop feel of the CD ROM is more attractive for some users than the Web.

It is an interesting and, in my experience, valid concern. Users become accustomed to a particular type of technology and don’t like to change. This explains why secretaries prefer old mainframe entry screens for HR data as opposed to newer, intuitive Web interfaces. It explains why people opt for the messy HTML code of Microsoft Word as opposed to using a real HTML editor.

Change is difficult and if it involves technology, it’s twice as difficult. Some manufacturers, and technologies, are finally starting to understand this truth.

Macromedia certainly seems to get it The are announcing the new Macromedia Central at the FlashForward conference this week,

Addressing the limitations of tying a product to one platform for users, Macromedia Central will create an environment where Flash applications can run independent of the browser. This means that people who don’t like working asynchronously in Web browsers will be able to work in Flash applications offline, outside the browser and in their own comfortable virtual space.

Rob Lancaster, an analyst for research firm The Yankee Group, confirms this, saying that one potentially significant market for Central is the corporate sector. Central could be incorporated into commonly used parts of corporate portals, such as employee directories, to make them available when a worker is away from the office and offline. He sees many of Central’s offline applications will be extensions of the online Flash experience companies have integrated into their Web sites.

Of course, for Macromedia, this is simply a business move -y trying to gain a larger share of the market by accessing people where they haven’t been able to reach them so far. But the fact that they are making the move proves that they see the problem.

It’s not enough to make people go to the information — you must be willing to expand the platform so that it takes the information to them, wherever they may be.

Another popular example of this kind of extended and flexible platform is found in blogging. Weblogs became popular first with tech-savvy users who wanted an easier way to create Web sites and communities. Their popularity spread quickly, however, because they were so easy to use. Soon, non-techies were putting their words on the Web via blogs.

But the technology still faced a big obstacle. After all, people were being asked to put things on the Web and that was scary, particularly if it had to be done via a Web browser.

Of course, as blogging communities are good communities, they decided to meet the needs of the poor users who were uncomfortable with the Webbiness of the whole process. To do that, they developed desktop editing clients that look and feel like word processors and that reside on the user’s local machine. This meant that users could, comfortably, participate in the whole Web process without ever feeling that they had left their desktops. Naturally, the editors have other nice uses as well — for example, when users don’t have a connection to the Web or when they want to work on a post over a period of time before posting it.

But the real wins, whether with evolving philosophies from proprietary vendors like Macromedia or more communal and open technologies like blogging, are for the users. By untethering products from their traditional forms, we are allowed to become untethered as well. We gain new options and the freedom to try new avenues for collaboration and community without having to travel quite so far.