ACRL-VWIG & ALA Virtual Communities in Libraries Program
April 23, 2017  CVL Auditorium in Second Life 12:00pm SLT

"The TARDIS & Team Collaboration: Using SLACK to Manage Projects thru Space and Time"
presented by Halsted Bernard (Cygnoir Blanc in SL),
Circulation Divison Manager, Tigard Public Library, Tigard, Oregon

At this meeting, Cygnoir Blanc, a librarian with indepth experience with a wide variety of online collaboration tools, provided an overview of the basic features of the project management/collaboration tool, Slack.

 

 

Online collaboration makes use of many forms of communication; email; texting; Facebook groups; video-conferencing via FaceTime or Skype; Google Docs; Dropbox etc. All of these tools have a learning curve, may make it even more difficult to communicate and can make it harder to try and figure out which tool is the best one for the job.  SLACK is a tool that leverages the best aspects of all of them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slack, a free, online project manager and collaborative tool.What is Slack?

 What is Slack?

Slack has been compared to a chatroom, but it's much more robust than that.  It's more like a digital workspace.  It incorporates in one place, many of the project management tools that teams separated by  time or distance use today.  Slack is accessible from any web browser. It also has desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux.  More importantly, Slack is a FREE online tool with zero cost to set up for groups working on any project or interest. 

 

The Slack development team surveyed thousands of users in order to better understand its' collaborative benefits to teams and found 2 eye-opening statistics: on average, teams that use Slack have reduced their internal email by 48.6%. That’s nearly half of all emails sent internally. 
  
Teams that use Slack have 25.1% fewer meetings. Fewer emails and fewer meetings means more time saved!  

The Slack interface for Community Virtual Librarys.

To use it, the project manager sets up a "Slack team".  With a very intuitive design, the group activities are divided into channels and direct messages.  These are the 2 main means of communication in Slack.  The various channels are used to organize commuincation around topics or projects.   When a group member logs into the Slack site set up for their group,  they can communicate to all the other members in their particular group by chatting or uploading documents/graphics etc into the appropriate channel.  This allows everyone in the same group to see everything you've submitted, in one place.  Channels allow one to organize material for specific projects so that sub-groups don't have to go through materials that others are working on.  The conversational threads allows members to focus on just the part they need to see instead of having to weed through all the comments of all the sub-groups.

Slack also allows for direct, private messages between two members, or, can include up to 9 people a once should the team wish to hold a meeting to discuss some project. Direct messages work both in real time and asynchronously, like a message board.  This allows team members to communicate effectively with people across timezones and who are not in the same physical space.

Slack has an easy to use drop-and-drag interface.  This allows members to easily share images, PDFs, documents and spreadsheets in one place. without the need for separate logins to sites, and without the need to install multiple apps.  Slack allows group members to share files, add comments and have a fully collaborative shared workspace.  

There are mobile apps that allow you to "Slack on the go" with your iOS, Android, or Microsoft device. Anywhere you are, Slack can be. 
  
Slack can notify you about new activity in your channels and direct messages. Notifications are so robust that you can set them per channel and even per keyword. Or if you prefer not to be notified, you can turn them off entirely.

 

Following the presentation, Cygnoir led the group on a live demo, inviting attendee's to join and explore this very powerful tool for collaboration.