With countless digital communication tools available today, it's all too easy to get drawn into using too many of them. This begs the question - where will we find time to do any actual work?

For one-way marketing, posting across multiple platforms may be effective. You can automate messages to reach as wide an audience as possible. But when it comes to 2-way or group communication, we need to be more selective.

Consider any big project with many colleagues spread across the world and across time zones. A fairly typical web project. We need to facilitate communication, coordinate what we are doing, share expertise, to build a community and generally build momentum for the project.

Covering all bases

Moving beyond a simple email list, we start a project forum. The form provides Q&A, general interaction and a history. But its not immediate, so we add IRC (Internet Relay Chat). We are missing out on something here. Stack Overflow is good for technical questions, so we need a channel on Stack Overflow. Then comes Slack, with its plethora of channels—turning communication into a fragmented, short-lived black hole.

For social engagement, we might think of setting up a Facebook group, but why stop there? Add MS Teams, a Reddit community, LinkedIn, and even WhatsApp groups to the mix. Each channel has its strengths, but as the options expand, spreading communication across too many channels inevitably leads to chaos.

If I want to find something out or get something done, where do I ask? Where do I search to see if it has already been asked and answered? Do I ask in one place, and hope that someone with the relevant expertise is monitoring that specific place? Do I ask everywhere, with the prospect that I am either ignored because others think I will have been answered somewhere else, or they get annoyed because they are inundated with notifications about the same thing from many different places. If I have time to help others, where do I go? Which channels do I help on? There isn't time in the day to check them all.

Fragmented community

The unhappy result, by providing the "best" communication medium for any individual scenario, we have diluted communication in a way that prevents it from functioning effectively as a whole and fragmented our community. With all these channels of communication we are spreading the jam too thin.

Think of it like telephone companies developing proprietary devices that can't connect to each other -you'd either need one phone per company or agreement that everyone subscribes to just one phone company. More than 100 years ago the phone companies got it right, they agreed on a single standard and they all talk to each other, both nationally and internationally. We are unlikely to see such common sense amongst the fiercely disruptive 'survival of the fittest' ethos that dominates the internet.

Solution

Any project can provide its own simple solution, to show some restraint. Choose one primary means of communication that is good enough for everything, even if it is not always the best or the most immediate or any individual's favourite. At least we are all in the same place.

For Concrete CMS, the current setup is forums.concretecms.org for discussions, GitHub for code issues, and personal communication can be whatever individuals prefer. Everything else is for one way marketing. It works. While this may not be the ultimate solution for every project, it strikes a practical and effective balance for Concrete CMS.

It wasn't always like that, but at least the folks in Portland came to the right conclusion. Communication is focused and strengthens the community. I wish some other projects understood. Fragmented communication undermines project management and project community.