The future of online collaboration seen through the eyes of SmartMobs author, Howard Rheingold, focuses on the ways in which we can leverage the use of these powerful new communication tools to our service and benefit.

Howard Rheingold, which I first met two years ago here in Rome, and then later visited in his inspiring artist home immersed in the green Marin Valley north of San Francisco, is a true explorer and social thinker worth following if you are seriously interested in online collaboration and understanding its future possibilities before they materialize.

Photo credit: Robin Good - Howard Rheingold in Rome

In 1985, Howard became involved in the now historical WELL, a computer conferencing system where some of the greatest mind and thinkers of that time used to meet and discuss online. His first attempt at writing about life and online communities ended up in a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community. Howard is indeed also credited with inventing the term "virtual community" and has had the privilege of serving as both editor of The Whole Earth review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. In 1994, he was also one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired.

In this good conversation I explore with Howard the social aspect of online collaboration and communication tools, while touching also upon IT departments and organizational change, contextual collaboration, P2P, open standards and the issue of collaboration tools literacy which is one of our greatest limits today.

Here is both a downloadable podcast .mp3 file as well as an immediately playable streaming audio file. Just click the play button and in a few seconds the recorded audio interview will start playing (turn up your speakers volume and make sure you are on a broadband connection).

Full transcript of Robin Good interview with Howard Rheingold

Photo credit: Robin Good - Howard Rheingold watching the view from Mount Tamalpaias

Robin Good: Hello everyone. Here is Robin Good live from Rome, in Italy, and I'm here again for our series on the future of online collaboration. Here with me on the other side of the oceans is somebody who has been researching, studying, and writing and publishing a lot of interesting information about can indeed evolve in the way they use new media communication technologies to cooperate and work more effectively together. Good morning Howard. How are you today?

Howard Rheingold: Good morning Robin.

Robin Good: How is it over there today?

Howard Rheingold: It's a splendid warm summer day and I'm looking forward to working on the lawn barefoot with my laptop and my wifi.

Robin Good: That's great to hear and I wish you indeed no clouds come over your head today and here it is indeed Howard Rheingold, one of the most respected authors in the field of... may I say "social computing"?

Howard Rheingold: Sure. From the beginning the social part was always at least if not more interesting than the computing part.

Robin Good: And I would like in fact Howard to give a good and open introduction to himself and who he really is, what he's doing, and where you are coming from Howard. Please share it with us.

Howard Rheingold: Well you know, nowadays, some people are talking about the Pro-Am revolution for the professional amateur and I think I'm a good example of a Pro-Am in the sense that really, at the foundation, I'm an amateur in the sense of someone who loves what they're doing. I got involved with computers and communicating online because it was a really wonderful tool for my work. I'm a writer. I just fell in love with the ability to amplify my mind and my communications and began writing about why I like these tools.

You know, I think very much like you. So yes, I am a professional. I write books about it. At the root of it is my enthusiasm which I suppose started about 20 years ago. I actually had been writing since my early 20s using typewriters and when I found out that you could use computers to write with so that I didn't have to retype my pages every time I wanted to make a change, I began pursuing that.

And that was really quite early, before the Macintosh computer, before Windows, before you had anything other than the command line interface on the PC and I didn't really know very much about technology. In the early 1980's, I got connected with places that were doing more advanced things, like Xerox PARC, the kind of legendary research centre where a lot of the personal computer came from and talked myself into a job there writing.

I used to commute there actually an hour drive each direction from where I lived in San Francisco so I could write on this fantastic machine, it had a mouse and Windows and laser printers. So I don't want to make this a huge long story, but I started writing about what these tools for which I was so enthusiastic about might mean in the future.

In 1985 I published a book called "Tools for Thought". It was so long ago that publishers didn't know anything about digital rights so the entire book is online, on my website, looking at what life might be like in the year 2000.

So it's a kind of interesting retrospective look at futurism now. If you look at the last chapter you'll see that I bought a modem, it cost me $500 and it was 1200 Baud back then and started exploring the bulletin board culture. That led me to the online world. I wrote a book about social communications online in 1993 called "The Virtual Community". I think it's interesting to note now that the Internet and social communications online are such a big deal.

But it took me five years to get publishers to let me write that book. I wrote my first article on the virtual community in 1987 for Whole Earth Review magazine, but I just couldn't get a publisher to think that anyone but an electrical engineer would be interested in using computers to communicate with.

My most recent book, I'm going to leap ahead here so I don't have a monologue, but my most recent book, "Smart Mobs", was about what I think is the latest revolution, the newest way of combining the mobile telephone, the computer, and the Internet into a new communication media that's just beginning to emerge.

As you can see, over the last 20 years at least, with these three books I've become immersed in the tools that I use and I've tried to understand where they're heading and explain that to people.

Photo credit: Robin Good

Robin Good: Great. Thank you for that introduction. It felt indeed very close to my little story as I myself, in the years that you were going to Xerox PARC, chose to receive a Toshiba personal computer that cost more than a fridge and a television set together for my wedding present.

It didn't even have a hard disk and I wasn't certainly a very geeky type of person but I did want to discover what the revolution of computers was all about, and said to myself: "I have to take wings right now as this is taking off otherwise I'm not going to be able to understand this language in the future and I want to be part of it".

So thank you for that beautiful introduction and you indeed touched some sensitive spots.

Now, let me dive right into the topic of our focus today which is online collaboration.

Howard, do you have your own way to define this?

Howard Rheingold: I can't give you an immediate short sound bite on that but I think it's clear to anyone who's listening to this that we are swimming in a sea of tools, from voice-over-IP to instant messaging to message boards, to blogs, to RSS, to podcasts, that enable communication with people who share interests but may not necessarily have known each other before they connected online.

And that really was what ignited my enthusiasm about virtual communities many years ago. The idea that you could connect with someone that you don't know who's on the other side of the world maybe but who shares an interest and you can communicate with that person.

Just like with you, Robin: we communicated online about our shared interest in online social communications and when I found myself in Rome we got together face to face.

I see the magic of the Internet is to connect people who share an interest and now we see just a huge proliferation of tools for doing that. You have people available at the periphery of your attention. We have instant messaging.

You can communicate with communities of people through online groups. I think nowadays the problem isn't so much availability of tools as the literacy of how to use them. We're seeing examples from the open source world, where a worldwide community creates very powerful tools that challenge the industry leaders in a kind of everyday "your little sister has a blog".

You're immersed in an emerging literacy. And that literacy I think is the key. How do we use these things? How do we teach each other to use these things? How do people learn to use them?

Robin Good: That's the question I want to ask you next.

Howard Rheingold: It's the social part of the technology that I think is the tricky part. You can buy a manual and figure out how to make the machine work but the human communication the human working together part that involves a lot of other things that aren't in the manual.

Robin Good: Indeed, many people and organizations play a lot of their investment and expectations on buying or selecting this or that tool to make people collaborate better. But is that really the effective strategy to go about this?

Howard Rheingold: I think that we are so early in this that we fail to make the distinctions between let's say the plumbing and the society that you can build on. The IT infrastructure, all of those wires and boxes and software, that's really necessary to enable people in an enterprise or freelancers like myself to connect up or groups like open source communities to connect.

But it's not the engineering of the tools that dictates how we use them but really almost the age old unwritten customs about trust and reciprocity and the way humans work together that's important.

I've had a consultancy over the years of helping people who are trying to build online communities and so often they say their plans are dictated by their IT department. I have great respect and sympathy for the people who are trying to maintain this ecology of tools and keep them running for people.

But because you're a great engineer does not necessarily mean that you know anything about how humans communicate with each other.

I see a need for a whole level of thinking, beyond just what tools we are going to buy for our company or how do I plug this into my PC.

Photo credit: Robin Good

Robin Good: How do we bring within the frameworks that we are building within small groups of companies as well as within large organizations the appropriate foundations that would enable even traditional viewpoints, consolidated conservative viewpoints like the ones of IT, to open up and consider seriously changing our approach to how people can share documents, put things on a server, send them to somebody else, allow instant communications and all that? Have you learned something about how we can get around this issue?

Howard Rheingold: You've put your finger on the really difficult problem, which is organizational change. Believe me, I've tried to deal with it, not as an expert on organizational change - which I certainly am not - but as someone who knows how to organize online communities.

Companies come to me and say we want to do this and I will tell them what I can tell them but time and again I've found without putting in place the incentives and structures and permissions of freedom necessary for people to explore a new way of doing things.

Just installing a technology is not going to change the way people do things in organizations.

I remember the PC...

When the PC first started hitting offices, I remember so many managers who said, "I don't have a keyboard in my office. That's for secretaries." I think the way the PC and the Internet really began entering companies was because the young employees who weren't necessarily very high in the hierarchy had learned how to use these things in college - or even earlier - and they brought their literacy with them into the company... and it kind of seeped in from the ground up.

Eventually, the old people retired and the younger people came into positions of power or started their own companies. It's very difficult to change organizational culture and I certainly respect anyone who is able to do that.

But I think the easy thing to say is that if you think that you can create communities in practice that change the way people share knowledge and communicate in your enterprise, it's a lot more than what box to buy and how do you install the software. It has a lot to do with the internal organization.

Who has permission to do this? Who's rewarded for doing it? Those are not really regarded as technology but they're really required for online collaboration to work.

Robin Good: Absolutely, I fully agree with you. Let me go to the opposite side and come close again to the tools themselves or to the technology as such: does in your opinion online collaboration have to happen in real-time?

Howard Rheingold: No. One of the great advantages of the tools we have is that we can mix and match real-time tools like we're using now, voice-over-IP, semi-real-time tools, like instant messaging where you might send a message but I might be busy for the next 30 seconds and I'll get back to you when I get a chance, and asynchronous tools like message boards, email, email lists...

I don't know where RSS and blogs fit in, but you know we have a whole suite of tools that we should fit into our ways of working and not become slaves of. I think that that's really an important dimension here. It's that the freedom that new tools give you is what you should take advantage of.

You shouldn't become a slave to them and rearrange your life around the tool!

Robin Good: So I guess this depends very much on how much the tools fit myself and my needs. So it would be spontaneous for me to ask you where do you find the limitations in today's so-called collaboration technologies?

Howard Rheingold: The limitations are in how people know how to use them: people like you know a lot. A lot of people who may know how to use IM or email don't really know how to use them effectively. Let me start with an almost absurdly simple example: people don't put descriptive subject lines in their email.

I'm often asked this when I talk to someone in an enterprise, particularly a technology enterprise: "Do you get people in your organization sending you emails that have either no subject line or a subject line like about your email or about our conversation? How long does it take?"

A few seconds to put a descriptive subject line on an email, and it makes all the difference in the world... To say nothing of the problem of people who are CC'ing maybe thousands of people who don't really need to get in on the message! So knowing how to use the tools, how do you pass that lore around.

That's at a very simple level. I think everybody will recognize they have a friend that's just new to using email and they will send them some urban legend: Bill Gates is not going to send you five dollars for all this email, yet that email keeps going around. There's a lag in knowing how to use the tools in something as simple as email.

When we get to more complex software, the literacy problem becomes even more complex. When do you stop using a mailing list and start using a message board? When do you not allow your buddy list to interrupt you when you're out of town? There's a lot of internal discipline involved in knowing how to use your tools, and how not to use your tools.

Photo credit: Robin Good - Howard Rheingold in Rome

Robin Good: Absolutely. Have you ever heard of the term "contextual collaboration"?

Howard Rheingold: No. Tell me more.

Robin Good: Well it's something that, according at least to some viewpoints, there are I think at least two or three different ones: we would see in the near future collaboration tools disappearing gradually within mainstream applications, so that the collaboration aspect will become an extension of what you are already doing, say writing or working with photographs, or with music or video or whatever you're doing.

That's one way that context collaboration can be enabled by making the tools disappear within those more fundamental applications. Contextual collaboration could also happen the other way around: large software companies like Microsoft could very well integrate collaboration mechanisms within the tools they already produce. Both of these approaches would enable a more intuitive and integrated form of collaboration. How do you see that?

Howard Rheingold: It would be wonderful to have access to all of these tools that I cobbled together in a more integrated manner. You have to be very careful about when you impose tools on people: if you remember, the talking paperclip in Microsoft Office was not very successful because its knowledge of your context did not extend to when you wanted to be interrupted or not.

There's a really interesting fellow that I met in Finland, who's a sociologist of technology named Larry Angstrom, who wrote about something he called "object oriented sociology", in which he pointed out that a lot of these recent social networking services really don't work so well because they don't really have an object to network around.

But a couple of the more popular applications these days are group applications sharing bookmarks, or sharing streams of photos, and they are actually social networking services - but they're centred not around your social network, who's my friend, and who's my friend's friend, and do you want to know them.

But "here's a photograph I think is cool", "Take a look at the other photographs I've got", "Oh look, we've got a lot in common." Or, "here are the sites I've bookmarked", "Look at what else I've bookmarked."

There's a context there to what it is that people are sharing whether they know each other or not before they share them that brings people together around that kind of social software.

That's a kind of social context. I think you're talking about the kind of context of the work task. That's a lot more difficult. I salute anyone who can figure out when it is that I writing something that I want to go out and communicate with someone.

Photo credit: Howard Rheingold

Robin Good: But then by the use of these social cooperation tools, the ones we've been mentioning - like social bookmarks - would seem to create a form of unconscious coincidental cooperation out of a selfish job. Is there some lesson we can learn out of this?

Howard Rheingold: The great overall lesson about the Internet is that there are people out there that you don't know but who you ought to know whether it's because you need to know something in the next five seconds and you will never contact that person again or it's someone who shares so many interests with you that they ought to become a friend even if they live on the other side of the world.

I am particularly excited by that, being a freelancer who works at home. Increasingly, we're living in this globalized world. We're living in this world in which enterprises and industries change very rapidly.

You can't count on just the person who's in the organization chart or in the next office or the person you've known for 10 years being the person who knows what you need to know or is the person who makes the best collaboration team.

The ability to find and connect with people over shared interests, that's really a miraculous advantage that I think we're beginning to take for granted now.

Robin Good: Howard, is P2P a resource or opportunity for online cooperation or collaboration?

Howard Rheingold: What we're talking about in a lot of ways is P2P! When you say P2P, people think about file sharing, and that reminds them about the controversy over stealing music or stealing movies. That's because the old enterprises that have a business model based on that model of distribution have framed it that way.

I'm certainly all for paying the people who create intellectual property.

But there's a whole world of sharing resources of sharing not just what my bookmarks are or what my photographs are but sharing my computing cycle, sharing the memory device on an ad hoc basis that we've only begun to explore.

As people participate in things like SETI@home, where they volunteer their computers to crunch numbers to help look for signals from outer space, or Folding@home, where people volunteer their computers to help find out how protein molecules fold for biochemical researchers who are trying to find new medicines.

There's a whole world of collaborative possibilities in which not only our minds but also or machines and our software and our data can collaborate.

I'm talking not only on an individual level.

We're already seeing enterprises doing that. That's really what supply chain management is about: it's about all these companies that are not the same company. In fact, many are competitors who link their data so closely that when you take an object off a shelf of a store in Arizona, its replacement is manufactured in China instantaneously and is on its way to that store. That's I think all part of the same technical framework but companies and individuals use it in somewhat different ways.

Photo credit: Ross Mayfield - Howard Rheingold kicking off the Cooperation Class at Stanford

Robin Good: Are open standards an important factor in the future development of online collaboration tools?

Howard Rheingold: Without a doubt. A lot of people don't appreciate the fact that the Internet works the way it does. We're able to have things like the world wide web suddenly appear on it or some kids in a dorm room to invent a search engine or some other people invent voice-over-IP because the architecture of the Internet is built on open standards. They didn't have to go ask anybody's permission to create their application and spread it around.

They just made sure it complied with all of the standards that all of the international connected computers comply with. It's not just about things like open-source software. It's about being able to make a tool that enables others to plug it into their tools. It's about self-interest that adds up to more for everybody.

A lot of people get confused about open standards because there are certain industry battles being fought over them, but in a larger sense it's about can you or your teenager start the next big enterprise. Or can you, Tim Berners Lee, give away something that's useful to everyone in the world without either having to ask permission, get a license, or require the Internet to be rewired?

Robin Good: So it would also mean that when we respect open standards we also create tools that allow us not to stick to one unique product or brand but can actually interoperate and make it possible for me to use a specific brand X to talk or send you stuff while you use brand Y to do the same type of things. Is that your interpretation of what open standards should enable?

Howard Rheingold: Well, you're not going to see the kind of explosive growth and rising economic tide that lifts all boats but if we really have a fragmented world we need contact with each other.

A great example of that is SMS, which took off in a lot of the world but took a long time in the U.S., simply because it was very difficult to send a message from your telephone to the telephone of a friend who might have been using a different operating area. Creating open standards enables the entire resource base to grow. People I think want to keep their market share sometimes I think at the expense of making the market a thousand times larger than it was before.

Robin Good: Well I guess they are not aware of that opportunity otherwise they would certainly buy in on our proposition. So we need more real world example like the preceding ones that can open up this path for others. Not to be pioneers but just to follow and take on this pattern definitely. Do you see the issue of security and identity being also a critical component of the future of online collaboration tools?

Howard Rheingold: If security doesn't get a lot better at the operating system level and at the server level then software that enables all this to happen behind the scenes has not been concentrated on being really secure.

Obviously we've seen the results of that with the spam and the viruses all over.

That really I think is a serious threat that could halt or even reverse this IT collaboration revolution and I know that the vendors who meet these things care a lot more about it now than they used to. There's not a heck of a lot that you and I can do about it. It really has to be built in at the level of plumbing. But I also think people need to be educated.

Spam exists because some people answer that spam. A lot of people have stupid passwords like the word "password". It's really a combination of making sure the plumbing doesn't fail and making sure that people understand that they shouldn't leave their computers unwatched for other people to take advantage of.

I'm not at all sure that we're going to be successful: it's a critical uncertainty about whether the systems we use are going to be secure enough against all of the predators out there for them to continue to be useful.

Robin Good: But do you think that enabling technologies that allow people to identify themselves precisely would be critically important in making this possible or do you see this as not being the critical path or solution?

Howard Rheingold: No. For many applications, particularly mission critical applications and enterprises, being able to be certain of who you're communicating with and the channel you're communicating with is secure is essential.

In the larger world of just people and their email boxes, we would have a much diminished world if you could only get email from people you know. We have a tension there, between the need for security and the need to communicate with people you didn't necessarily know before.

Robin Good: Yes. You're very much into mobile computing and mobile communications. Do you want to share anything about what you see coming in the direction of converging mobile technologies that enable more than what we've seen so far to allow people to collaborate together in effective and productive ways?

Howard Rheingold: Of course, a lot of what I wrote about in "Smart Mobs" is the fact that when you combine different technologies sometimes you get an entirely new medium. It takes a few years for the unique power of that medium to make itself known.

The devices we're using now, the PCs we're using now, are perhaps a thousand times better than the toys that were available in the late 1970s. And if you think about my 1200 Baud modem in the 1980s and the broadband connection that enables us to have this conversation today, it's obvious that Moore's law and microchips that become more powerful really change the nature of the tool.

So we're used to thinking of these things we carry as telephones but increasingly they're little computers. They're little Internet terminals and when you combine the telephone, the computer, and the Internet you are going to get a new medium. And we're only beginning to see what we can do with that.

Enabling collective action is the unique characteristic of this medium, just as many to many communication is the unique characteristic of the Internet and the fact that you can make a PC do anything, you can program it to take the characteristic of another computer.

We're only beginning to see what that means. Global social software, we're only just starting to see experiments where people can use telephones to make contact with people in the face to face world who they don't know but who have some common cause.

Over the years we're going to see devices that are much more powerful. We're going to see them link up with each other in ways that we hadn't thought of before and we're going to see groups of people doing things just as we're seeing on the Internet. Like eBay: people are creating markets that never were possible before.

We're going to see markets, we're going to see political movements, we're going to see cultural and social changes created simply by the fact that we have so many people carrying this new medium around with them.

It's worth also thinking that with the last 10 years growth of the Internet, the mobile telephone is much younger, and in five years time half the people in the world may be carrying a device.

That means something, and we're not entirely sure what it means yet.

Photo credit: Robin Good - Howard Rheingold

Robin Good: Yes. If I were to present you for the next answer a group of listeners made up only of software developers and engineers who work for companies today that develop these conferencing and collaboration tools that enable people to work together in real time online, would you be able to give them two or three tips as far as their overall strategy should evolve?

What are the things that they should pay attention to, that maybe they haven't paid enough attention to outside of all the good things we've said so far?

Howard Rheingold: Well, we talked about open standards. But one of the essentials I have when we talk about open standards that I should make specific is to enable your users to innovate, because they're going to have to do so anyway.

If you make it difficult for them to innovate then the potential for the goals you're trying to make are going to be much smaller otherwise. More and more the enterprises that create tools really have to collaborate and partner with the tools users.

User collaboration is something that happens all over the world in many different categories but particularly with communications devices. Enable people to think up new things to do with the things you create. And don't punish them for it: enable them to find rewards for it.

Robin Good: Great advice. Thank you Howard for that. Do you think these developers that are listening to us are facing some latest challenge? That is, do you think it is market driven and the need is to capitalize fast or there is exceedingly strong focus on the engineering part. Where do you see them being a little blinded by the light?

Howard Rheingold: Well, I know that there is a growing awareness among the people that build tools that the people they work for are increasingly not regarding users as their customers. Their customers are large enterprises that own and sell content.

So the user who innovates, who created the PCs we know, is in many ways being transformed back into the passive consumer of the old days, where there were a couple of television channels and one telephone company per country.

This digital rights management business that's being baked right into the operating system and hardware will limit the ability of the users to invent interesting and useful new things. I wish that the people who are working on this - many of them understand what I am talking about - would be able to have more influence on the people who are running the companies and who may have a very different agenda.

Robin Good: Thank you Howard. Those were indeed all very insightful and helpful answers and I much appreciate the time you've decided to spend with us in the early morning in your wonderful home.

Here is Robin Good, in Rome. This was a good conversation about the future of online collaboration with Howard Rheingold, out there in California. Howard, thanks again and over to you for the closing remarks.

Howard Rheingold: Well, it was my pleasure. I follow what you have to say simply because there are new tools and new ways to use them every day and we need to have a channel open to people out there like you who are exploring what they mean.

We have to spend part of our days retooling and if you don't do that you're not able to take advantage of the opportunities that are available out there.

It's not just going to come in a package on your desk. It's something you need to do with your mind.

About Howard Rheingold

Photo credit: Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold is one of the most important leading thinker on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communications media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and "virtual communities" (a term he created himself). In 2002, Rheingold published Smart Mobs, exploring the potential for technology to augment collective intelligence. Shortly thereafter, in conjunction with the Institute for the Future, Rheingold launched an effort to develop a broad-based literacy of cooperation. Check out the complete list of the books written by Howard Rheingold on his website.