Six Sites

When I started working on revamping SIx Sites last week, my only goal was to move from Tumblr to Chyrp. But during the process I discovered that using a micro-blog tool can actually make for a powerful collaboration tool as well. It is a bit early to make any firm decisions, but the more I think about it, the more I can see using sixsites.com as the central hub as the primary collaboration point.

Tools like Basecamp and Backpack are great. It is what I’ve been using up until this point. But for many projects I really only use one or two features, like messages and the Writeboard for longer documents (since messages can’t be edited by others). Backpack is too much of a single-user system, it doesn’t track who is adding content and organizing large spaces is near impossible. Basecamp is designed to be a client system, each project is a silo of data, not very suitable for ad-hoc teams or early stage collaboration.

This is probably my biggest frustration, no cross over. Product collaboration needs to make sure that lots of ideas are cross pollinating each other. And even client projects need cross over, two teams can be working on many problems simultaneously and you need a way to keep separate trains of thought separate for long stretches of time, then merge them at the right time.

Using the Micro-Blogging metaphor

So it occurs to me that if you really focus on primary goals of online collaboration tools, it quickly breaks down into a couple of features.

• You need to control who sees what.
• You need to post messages, and notify people that message exists.
• You need to share documents or files, and have discussion around them.
• You need flexible ways to organize information as the project will evolve as time goes by.

To-Do and milestones are also important, but they apply to more specific stages of a project. For example, during the early stages and after the project is completed, these features are less applicable.

Chyrp features out of the box:

• Publishing multiple types of content, text, links, chat or IRC transcripts, files, etc
• Every object is commentable, with email notifications.
• Every item is taggable, for creating multiple views based on topics
• User registration, groups and a decent permission system
• Importing of RSS feeds, from external sources, like your SVN or Git repo’s
• XML-RPC so you can use (or build) external tools or widgets.

With a little customization you can easy add:

• Status updates, for providing quick posts to communicate where you are.
• Milestones, or date based posts with comments
• Posting to Twitter, to provide either a matching public Twitter stream, or a private own

Really the only thing it doesn’t have that Basecamp does is to-do’s or wiki-style pages.

For me the biggest advantage with having an open-source tool like Chyrp, is I can evolve it with the project. So if I need a feature it doesn’t have, I can grab a module and install it, or write one myself.

At any rate, we’ll see how well it works for products at sixsites.com. But I definitely think for any future client work I do, I will look to use a tool like Chyrp as well.