challenges

Attention Asymmetry. What’s important to you right now - as you write and send an email -- may not be as important to everyone you send it to, and it gets ignored. And it may not be clear what action they need to take, or whose input is needed, and how the decisions are to be made.

Channelization Challenges: related to the above, there’s a common shortcut in any collaboration community to post something to the “general” channel (to get a larger audience). Creating specific channels/topics should theoretically work, but people ignore them. Probably the best solution for tools (like Teams, Slack) to support ways to smoothly recategorize discussions to the proper channel (and renotify subscribers). The long-term benefit is better organization, and more tidy conversations, leading to more stakeholders involved in things they can decide.
(see Is it possible in Slack to move a message to a thread? - Super User)

Multithreaded Mastery. Many online collaborations require some mastery of parallel (or multithreaded) discussions. How many ordinary people can truly master multiple discussions in parallel? Seemingly many “online” people can. But, how many people in the general population can? How many people in a volunteer community can? Many people, in their volunteer efforts, have only the mental bandwidth for a single channel, fewer messages, and direct options.

Imperfect tool momentum. Project management software continually improves, but not every team uses the latest and greatest. Of course, teams have worked together without optimized project software for decades. Sticking out for better tools and processes may seem unnecessary to many, and yet, we should get some clarity on the best tools for online decision-making.

Backlog Prioritization Opacity. The "backlog" is the term in Agile for the list of tasks to be done? What wizardry do product owners use to prioritize work off the backlog? I’ve long wondered: how can we be sure that lesser visible items get proper priority? What about in public services where user input may simply never get to the product owner?

Bluffworthy vs trustworthy. A lot of work is bluffing -- and bluff-detecting. A software team leader can claim everything’s tested; it’s up to the release lead to detect, yes, if they are bluffing to some extent. Bluffing is also easier with distant work; it feels more tiring to chase people down via video calls than just walking down the hall. How to get teams tobe  way out of it is to get teams to be more trusting than bluffing.

Collective Oversight Matrix. In any large business, there’s much work to assemble progress dashboards, inquire into the different teams (projects, applications), and assess their progress/compliance. That level of dedication & effort is only done in certain governments (Federal; NYC). It’s half-heartedly done in many states and often simply missing in many counties and localities. There doesn’t seem to be the money, resources, or even interest.

Social Media Disinhibition. This applies to the Internet as a whole rather than intranets. While online antisocial behavior is widely chronicled, we don’t see enough considerations about the ordinary rhetorical shortcuts -- those that are “victimless” but generally undermine the quality: plagiarism; copyright ignorance (pasting full articles in defiance of subscription paywalls); mindless reposting of memes of questionable veracity or even “trashposting” (sharing without concern for the audience). How do we address this?

Positive Civic Social Media Demonstration. This also applies to the Internet as a whole rather than intranets. There are a lot of examples of social media providing negative examples, particularly to kids and teens. Should we be declaring that all social media is either harmful or a time-waster? Or is there some objective way we can qualify certain digital networking efforts as positive?