I will go with email as, like for most people at work, it is far and away the collaboration tool I use the most.
I will add however that, with the following declarations of bias, a web-integrated mailing list manager such as <a href="http://groupserver.org">GroupServer</a> can be used to mitigate email's main weakness which is that it is poor for many-to-many collaboration.
The declarations of bias are firstly that my company <a href="http://onlinegroups.net">OnlineGroups.net</a> are the authors of GroupServer and secondly that it is open source, towards which I have some bias.
It is my view that email continues to dominate online collaboration because it is so versatile. Everyone has an address and an inbox. All flavours talk to each other. For this reason it is fantastic for one-to-one and one-to-many communication.
Sadly, by itself email is poor for many-to-many conversations. There is no way to maintain a stable list of participants or otherwise manage privacy. There is no easy way to keep track of ongoing conversations let alone more than one at a time. And there is no canonical searchable archive.
Web-integrated mailing list managers mitigate these problems very well. The group has managed membership and privacy settings. The email header has a little extra metadata providing context that makes it easier to triage email without opening it. The web archive separates conversations by subject line making it easy to follow a conversations over years, or when there are several occurring at one time. And of course, with systems where you can post from the web, there is great flexibility as to how you participate.
I will go with email as, like for most people at work, it is far and away the collaboration tool I use the most.
I will add however that, with the following declarations of bias, a web-integrated mailing list manager such as <a href="http://groupserver.org">GroupServer</a> can be used to mitigate email's main weakness which is that it is poor for many-to-many collaboration.
The declarations of bias are firstly that my company <a href="http://onlinegroups.net">OnlineGroups.net</a> are the authors of GroupServer and secondly that it is open source, towards which I have some bias.
It is my view that email continues to dominate online collaboration because it is so versatile. Everyone has an address and an inbox. All flavours talk to each other. For this reason it is fantastic for one-to-one and one-to-many communication.
Sadly, by itself email is poor for many-to-many conversations. There is no way to maintain a stable list of participants or otherwise manage privacy. There is no easy way to keep track of ongoing conversations let alone more than one at a time. And there is no canonical searchable archive.
Web-integrated mailing list managers mitigate these problems very well. The group has managed membership and privacy settings. The email header has a little extra metadata providing context that makes it easier to triage email without opening it. The web archive separates conversations by subject line making it easy to follow a conversations over years, or when there are several occurring at one time. And of course, with systems where you can post from the web, there is great flexibility as to how you participate.