rich services dominating in media (Re: Wiki page about Free Software for remote working)

[Bernhard E. Reiter]

Am Dienstag 31 März 2020 21:29:12 schrieb Paul Boddie:
> the media narrative seems to be dominated by technologies like
> videoconferencing, "feature-rich" real-time chat, 

To understand why people long for those features, we have to look at the 
people and their ideas of workflow.
If you want to do your meeting online now, you are accustomed
towards seeing and hearing your communicatio partners, reading their 
communication on all levels. You also see the shared boards, printout,
scribbles, looking at screens and projections and more. It is quite 
understandable for people to want much of these channels as possible
as they are an important factor to raise the chance of successful meetings.
(There used to be a research field called "computer supported cooperative 
work" (CSCW) where those basic needs had be examined starting a few decades 
earlier.)

> and other things that happen to have prominent and opportunistic 
> proprietary vendors looking for new customers.

Yes, proprietary vendors jump a lot and people are lacking time to consider 
the choices. And  providiers often have more capacity.
There are Free Software solutions as well, though.


> Yet successful distributed work can take place without these proprietary
> products. Indeed, some of the currently-hyped solutions are possibly some
> of the least efficient ways of getting work done, as some people are
> finding out.

And some solutions are actually delivering more than what people had before.

> Meanwhile, asynchronous communications like e-mail keep 
> getting the job done for many, despite continuing threats from the forces
> of consolidation and monopolisation towards independent mail (and Web)
> service providers.

It would be very cool to have an article to show how other collboration 
methods like wikis, fileshareing and email can help remote working.
However it must be non-lecturing in tone to be useful in my view.

Best Regards,
Bernhard

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