/Message: In The Time Of "Me-First": Stikkit

In a recent post, In The Time Of "Me-First": IBM Slowr?, I touched on a topic that I'd like to elaborate on. I was arguing for a me-first approach to collaboration as a hallmark of social applications. By this, I mean the individual comes first: the rights and capabilities associated with the user in social applications are linked to the individual, and are not (primarily) based on membership in groups. I wrote this about groupings, ad hoc collections of people within social networks, replacing groups:

Instead of groups, we need groupings: tagging the elements of network traffic is sufficient. Sure, we still need access control, so that only those allowed to can see certain information, but I think that putting locks on the stuff flowing around is better than locking up the people in secure spaces.

The Stikkit application, from Rael Dornfest and the folks at values of n, is a great example of this perspective.

Stikkit is an information organizer application based on the notion of semi-structured information within text 'notes'. Creating a note with event flavored information, like "meet with Joan Jaggers at 4pm Wednesday" leads to the app identifying the event, and linking the note with a contact note for Jane Jaggers. Stikkits with to do like items are identifed as such, and Stikkit aggregates to-dos, events, and contacts for ease of use.

But the only other organizing mechanism is tagging, which works by adding text to any note, like so "@europe, geveva, lift", which would indicate three tags.

And sharing is allowed on the notes, by adding people's nicknames or email addresses: "share with mike.smith@gmail.com, Carlo".

This lines up naturally with the notion I made in the earlier post: rather than defining group "places" -- a la Basecamp -- and giving people access to the places by declaring them to be members of the places' groups, in Stikkit individual pieces are shared with ad hoc groupings of people. There is no 'place' in Stikkit, there is only the note, and the on-the-fly association of those sharing it.

Every Stikkit is a forum, with a potentially unlimited number of comments (which can also come from email, now). And notes can link to other notes, or to arbitrary web locations.

I believe that the flexibility and fluidity of the Stikkit model lines up as perhaps the best exemplar of the me-first model, and stands in direct contrast with the groupware model of Basecamp.

I am planning to transition from Basecamp, as a result, and adopt Stikkit for my collaboration and coordination platform, and see where it leads me.

One issue has come up, which may be a blessing in the long run: Stikkit does not support file uploading or attachments to notes. Basecamp does have a workable (but flawed) file sharing model. So, to acheive the same in Stikkit, I have created a Box.net account just to support file storage, and then I am manually creating links in Stikket notes. I can put password protection on individual files in Box.net, and share that password with others that I want to have access to Box.net files. This, once again, pushes the security onto the object, not onto some shared space defined by group membership. This fine grained control is often what I really want, and what I have to approximate in a group-oriented system. For example, I might want to create a spreadsheet to share with a single member of a project team. In Basecamp, I would have to define a new project to get that sort of control, or perhaps I would simply email it to him. In Stikkit, I can share it with that person, we can comment on the spreadsheet, and then, at some later point, after incorporating his thoughts, I could simply add the names of others that I wanted to share the spreadsheet with.

All the while, I could tag all notes associated with a project with the obvious tag: "@project X". But at the same time, the note could tag all the notes with a blizzard of other tags, breaking out of the discrete taxonomic approach that folder-based solutions like Basecamp force on you. A note in the "project X" project might also be tagged "@design" and thereby aggregated with other design oriented notes across other projects.

I think Stikkit is a great example of me-first and bottom-up organization, and represents where social collaboration is headed: away from group-first and top-down methods.