ARTS & FARCES internet

About a week-and-a-half ago, I wrote that UserLand Software’s latest product, Radio Community Server (RCS) was a swing and a miss.

Problem is, I was looking at the little picture. All RCS does is allow you to serve a community of Radio-generated websites. But when the incremental cost to do that is US$0, that picture changes radically.

The big picture is that RCS is likely to have as great an impact on workgroup collaboration as networked personal computers did. Remember the first time you saw InBox. This is that all over again. (InBox was one of the first email programs for the Macintosh; it notified you of incoming email by scrolling the subject across the menu bar. This was when most people received 3 or 4 emails a day.)

Here’s the really big picture. I pushed hard for RCS to meet a price point that would allow individuals to sneak it in the back door of organizations. In a best case that would be under US$50, so the yearly license for Radio and RCS would be under US$100 and enterprising project managers could pay for it out of their discretionary budgets.

So what happens? UserLand ships RCS at no cost to anyone who has licensed Radio or Frontier. It’s subversive software. For US$40 a head, any organizational workgroup can establish a community of dynamic websites and aggregate and syndicate the content from those websites. No longer will it be beneficial for anyone to hoard or hide—or even try to control—information in an organization.

Consider this scenario. You work in an organization—large or small, it doesn’t matter—and you want to publish your notes on your current project. Nothing formal, just notes. And you’d like to have access to the notes of your collaborators, and maybe obtain feedback from them. Instead of passing paper notes or bouncing email back and forth, doesn’t it make a lot more sense to publish the notes somewhere they can be easily discovered and perused by your workgroup and others interested in what you might be doing. Of course it does.

In most organizations, unfortunately, you can’t just plop a server on the network and share your notes. There are channels, and request forms, and project charters, and project sponsors, and legal clearances, and requests for expenditures, and all the rest that you have to go through just to do something as simple as sharing your research notes within your own workgroup. And then, if all goes well, you face the distinct pleasure of dealing with the IT department, which occupies the fifth ring of hell.

And then if you want to actually change the information, or add more, you have to go through that process all over again. And God help you if you didn’t use the tools and platforms that are “approved” by the organization. Even if the information you need to distribute is critical to the project’s or even the organization’s success.

Some combination of Frontier, Radio, and RCS would have been appropriate, sustainable solutions for both of my last two corporate contracting engagements. In the former, development time for a departmental intranet site would have gone from 6 weeks to 4 days. In the case of the latter, the re-design and development cycle would have gone from 18 months to 60 days. Except that none of these products are “approved” within that organization.

But when you present a manager with an option that cuts the development cycle by several orders of magnitude, and actually costs less than the “approved” solution, an intelligent manager will listen. The unintelligent ones deserve what they get.

Personal computers infiltrated organizations through the back door. Someone brought one in to make his or her job easier and the notion spread, like a virus. RCS is going to infiltrate organizations the same way. To paraphrase John Gilmore, workgroups are going to start to recognize IT departments as damage and route around them with tools and platforms like Radio and RCS.