Collaboration: The small things

I think this is a good example of the small things that prevent collaboration:

Last month I saw a tweet about using Wikis with Enterprise Content and Process Management.
The speaker was Sandy Kemsley. Excellent BPM speaker. Interesting subject.

I clicked on the link to watch the web-session through UStream. Cute application.
The webcam opens up on the left side. The chat opens on the right.
The participants were adding their comments to the chat.
“Great” I thought. Collaboration.

I tried adding a comment and clicked on the send button.
A screen opened asking me to register to the UStream site. Aaaaahhh!…
So I decided to give up on adding a comment and concentrate on the presentation instead.

Now to be honest, It was already midnight in London, the presentation had already started, I’m terrible at multitasking and my comment was something trivial like “please put the microphone closer to the speaker” (which someone else said anyway a minute later)

I wasn’t worried about missing anything as I know Sandy always publishes her presentations online. The problems were not Sandy’s fault. It was the collaboration tool’s fault. I could live with the bad audio (you could hear her speaking with lots of forks and knives clinking in the background – it turns out that they were recording the session in a Pub – How cool is that!!), but I couldn’t add my 20 cents to the discussion because of logins and bureaucracy – which I feel is a lost opportunity.

Collaboration tools. Collaboration methodologies. Collaboration programmes. Great…
It’s sometimes the small things that prevent collaboration from working.