The short answer: Twitter can enable osmotic communication in virtual teams, and avoid social isolation.

Twitter, or any Twitter-style equivalent, is an endless stream of short messages created by millions of people around the globe. These messages can contain every type of information: a weather condition, the content of a fridge, a stock tip in response to someone asking; if you can fit the message in 140 characters, you can throw it in the Twitter information river.

Sender

You can add a message into the stream for no particular receiver, or you can address your information package to a particular person. If you want to sent me a message on Twitter, you do this by starting the 140 characters with @projectshrink.

Receiver

If you are plugged into Twitter you can try to follow every bit of information that flows by. Within 10 seconds you will drown by the sheer amount of bits. Twitter provides two ways to slice and dice the flow to get the information you might consider relevant. By person and by content.

• Person: you can follow every Twitter user you want. By selecting a person his or her Tweets (messages) will be shown to you.
• Content: you can create searches with keywords, and Twitter will provide you with a stream of all messages containing this keyword.

Real Time Small Messages

The most prominent characteristics of Twitter are “real time” and “small messages”. That is why it feels like “conversations in the background”.

If you run Twitter in the background (using tools like Tweetdeck) it is almost like listening to people talking in the background. Sometimes something catches you attention and you mentally zoom in.

It provides a virtual connection with the people you are following. Where ever you are with your laptop or iPhone, you get subtle impressions of what “the others” are up to. It creates a sense of “group”.

Osmotic Communication

Alistair Cockburn introduced in his book “Agile Software Development” the concept of osmotic communication – indirect information transfer through overhearing conversations or simply noticing things happening around you. To me personally it happens very often that a talk between people in the same room morphs from murmur in the background to a conversation you find yourself all of a sudden eavesdropping on.

Osmotic communication is a very important type of communication. It provides “missing” information, you don’t know you are missing. It provides sources you normally would not think about. It provides information in a context you haven’t considered.

The “triggers” for zooming in to chatter on the background are patterns. With Twitter we can use keywords popping up in a message as a trigger. If someone is talking about your project, mentioning it by its name, you will zoom in.

Sense of Group

The project landscape is turning mobile, multi-cultural, 24×7, highly distributed and in ever flux. The group you are working with can be scattered all over the world, in every time zone, but also just in the building across the street. Projects are allocated cutting almost every boundary in existence. This working environment increases the risk of isolation. Even in a room full of people one can have a sense of not belonging to any group. Feeling left out.

People need to feel part of a group. In the end we are social animals. Luckily for us, Twitter is social media. By following the people you want to form a group with, want to create a social connection with, you can have each other’s “presence” in the background at all time. As with all forms of communication, to create a real connection you need to participate, have a genuine two-way conversation.

Bas holds a masters degree in Business Informatics and lives with his wife in The Netherlands. He is author of the book “Surprise! Now You’re a Software Project Manager”

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Why You Should Use Twitter Style Communication In Your Project is a post from: Project Shrink.

This is only half the story. We also have “the broadcast”.

Image by salsipuedes.

When the city of Gotham needs Batman, they will project the Bat-logo high into the sky for everybody to see. Including Batman himself. Wherever he will be, he will get the information without a doubt (Unless it is clouded, he is locked in the Batcave, or gets problems with his eye-sight). The lesson from Batman is: to get information to people without locating them first, put it central enough so the chances that they get it, increases.

With broadcast the sender can (more or less) be identified, but the group of potential receivers might be quite large and unknown.

A great concept of its application can be found within the agile community that provides us with the concept of “information radiators“. “An information radiator is a large display of critical team information that is continuously updated and located in a spot where the team can see it constantly… Information radiators help amplify feedback, empower teams and focus a team on work results.” says AgileAdvice.

You can see some great examples in this article about Kanban boards.

Because of its “in your face” location it coordinates the movements of the team automatically. Team members can see instantly what they have to do next. This process is transparent, all the team members have the same information and therefor the same view on project reality. The social process of the team takes care that people who are lacking behind are assisted to keep up the pace, and if someone is taking a wrong turn the teams collective intelligence can be used to correct this. Information radiators are all about feedback, empowerment and focus.

But the group of receivers is not just the team. “… information radiators generally serve to inform people outside the project team,” writes Alistair Cockburn in his book “Crystal Clear“. “It is the people outside the team who want or need to know that information in order to make their own decisions and otherwise would interrupt the team to get that information…”

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Two Ways Of Communicating: Peer To Peer And Broadcast is a post from: Project Shrink.