About Dennis Griess and Collaborate!

photo of Dennis J. Griess

Collaborate! is a blog for collecting thoughts on how we work together.  For nearly 20 years, Dennis J. Griess has worked in and around collaboration and knowledge management.

In the olden days before we had social computing and Web 2.0, there was a world of complex, process-driven publishing.  It was the stuff that made tens of thousands of IBMers the instruments of the world’s second largest publisher (behind the US federal government).  We didn’t know at the time that the mark-up language invented by three IBMers: Goldfarb, Mosher and Lorie would become the foundation of what’s now HTML.

Back in the day, we used to be able to type tags (awkward stuff like :p. now <p>) and control text and font placement with precision while maintaining internal logic grouping and flow.  We could split up a multi-chapter book among authors and never have to worry about what would happen to the style when all the parts came together.

That was collaboration.  It was also structured and effective.

With the advent of personal computers, LANs  and the democratization of most computing tasks, the world got more complex.

I remember documents that came off the first small laser printers.  They looked like ransom notes.  If their printer had 15 fonts, clever authors would show you they knew it.  Take that kind of anarchy and multiply it several million times and you get the internet of the late 90s.  That’s when I became interested in not just publishing, but behavior.  How do we get people to be able to do more.  I didn’t know about the wisdom of crowds or tipping points.  I just knew we had to work together.  We had to figure out what we know and how not to recreate it every time.

So here we are, it’s 2009 and it’s time to share.  Please join me and share your thoughts.