Review on Communication

On the morning of our presentation we started to discuss our content which we had researched and how to turn this into a concise oral presentation. Through discussions it was made apparent that we had not fully considered the various connections between themes of communication and applying that to a collaborative environment.

Ironically enough this short discussion outlined just how essential regular face-to-face communication is within a collaborative environment.

We ended up discussing our topics and findings, feeding of each other and proposing ideas and various approaches to ensure we are being as relevant and comprehensive as possible.

This ensured our presentation was more concise and tailored to our project. As a result I've edited my topic information...



Communication Strategies

There are two main types of communication strategies; internal and external.

Internal

Due to the nature of collaboration, it was essential for our group to develop a cross communication strategy. This implicated a fluid communication network involving brainstorming and mind mapping to ensure an ideal collaborative work situation.

In establishing a communication strategy we need to look at our environment; we are a small team, working on a dynamic project with an experimental and agile development strategy. it is therefore even more essential to have an effective communication strategy to keep in contact with each other.

This kind of communication strategy lends itself to 'Passive Awareness', an indirect form of communication as all members of the group are being involved in all exchanges of communication. This adds to each individuals workload as more time is spent keeping up to date and aware of where all other team members are up to (e.g. uploading model updates).

In some cases the implication of our communication strategy involves spending more time strategising than actually implementing ideas, creating an ongoing cycle between strategy and implementation.

External

For our group external communication looks at how best to communicate our set of information to our target audience and how effective this is. This involves identifying our target audience and indentifying the best method of communicating with them (e.g. Bikers - do we add links to existing forums, tapping into a community that already exists?).

Our aim is to externally communicate a set of information accessible by a diverse range of people by offering various resources. these resources need to communicate information in a variety of different data forms which are simple to understand and easy to navigate through.
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