.:justwerks software:.

In the world of software engineering there is an underlying assumption that people can, and do, talk to each other. Mostly, we do.

The world of complex software requires that many individuals from many groups have fully functional N-way communication processes in place. These processes can utilize many tools, email is frequently at the top of the list, but why?

Some of the problems with email being the most frequent tool is that it is also the most weak tool in enabling N-way communication.
Email falls down in four specific ways:
It is Temporal
- it requires everyone to be in the group at the time of sending
- few of the companies I have worked at use mailing lists
It is Unstructured
- it cannot be easily linked into larger conversations
- HTML uses hyperlinks for this
- how many emails are in your inbox?
It is Unsearchable
- it requires great discipline in structure or great search engines to find information again
- see the above comment about inbox count
It is horrible at N-way communications
- email works better in 1 to N or 1 to 1 communications.
- check your inbox for fragmented multi-person conversations to see how it doesn't scale well if there are many voices speaking.

There are other tools available, such as: Wikis, blogs, instant messaging, IRC, and the new wave of burst notification communications (Twitter). Each of these has a different scale of functionality but they also require different management techniques with their own associated weak spots.

Wikis
are strong at many to many conversations but require strong management (the wiki gardener) to ensure the structure stays coherent. I *really* like the Wiki from Atlassian - Confluence - and am experimenting with what it offers - a Wiki but with some base level structure so you don't get side-tracked by the organization (or lack there-of) as you dive into Wiki-space.
Yes, Confluence is not free but the price is so low and the feature-set so strong that you will save the money you would have spent downloading the 8 million other free Wiki platforms out there. Bonus points for Java and Active Directory integration! I would work for them - they are that cool. They also make the kick-ass issue tracking system Jira.

Blogs
are strong at one to many conversations - I am not entirely sold of the idea of comments being a strong conversation medium as the original poster has a louder "volume" in the discussion. I see this as being the first post syndrome - the original post is much more likely to be read than the comments unless the blog is updated in response.

Instant Messaging
is essentially email for those of us with attention deficit disorder. No structure, date stamps only, no real storage structure potential and total lack of meta-data.
Novel Thot Aside: imagine if you could tag instant messaging conversations in real-time with meta-data to be able to search them later... this would hugely increase the find-ability of data at a later point. An idea like delicious for your IM logs. Neat. Patent it.

IRC
um, well, very temporal and occasionally a very high noise to signal communication channel. They are impossible to search and are geeky to the extreme.

Burst notifications
pretty limited to haiku information dispersal. I don't like. Tweet.

So, there are many options. As you can see, there is no silver bullet and there are strategies to deal with the other options available to those that venture outside of the inbox. Try it and let me know the results!