Jon Udell writes about the lack of margins in electronic documents. His blog post doesn’t add much, which is unusual… he often explores a theme or a tangent more fully there, which I appreciate.
Margins offer room for shared experience and interpretation. We’ve started using a Wiki as our shared project list and organic documentation tool. While it’s not a digital analog to the “scribblings” that Udell calls to mind, the informality — like email — seems to lower the mental barriers to participation. People jump in, with less concern over who “owns” a document. I enjoy the distributed, disjointed conversations that I follow, and sometimes participate in, via blogs and RSS feeds. However, teams need a more organic, less idiosyncratic medium for collaboration. So far, the Wiki feels right… and it gives us a bit of that extra shared space for passing along knowledge, small and large, that prompted Udell’s column.