Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. 

And they do have a very cool video presentation on their site about what they are about to do. Wonderfully done, very well explained.

Now that is good news. JotSpot has been acquired by Google. We are using JotSpot as our corporate wiki and are pretty happy with it as it is, but things will now likely improve.

Jot is currently sending around this email, which explains a bit about the acquisition.

JotSpot is now part of Google

We’re writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you’ll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we’re focused on migrating JotSpot to Google’s systems and datacenters. We’ll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won’t be inconvenienced.

Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?

Google shares JotSpot’s vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot’s team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups.

What does this mean for JotSpot customers?

We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team’s vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares that vision and presents us with the world’s best environment for delivering on it. We’ll be taking advantage of Google’s world-class systems infrastructure and operations expertise to ensure that access to your JotSpot is fast and reliable. We can’t share any of our plans publicly just yet, but we can tell you that we’re incredibly excited about the possibilities. We can’t think of a better company to have been acquired by.

Will paying customers still be charged?

We will no longer be billing customers for the use of the service. Although you will still have use of the product at your current pricing plan, we won’t charge you anymore when your current billing cycle expires.

What about security and privacy?

Your data is yours — that doesn’t change at Google. We will continue to work to ensure the privacy and security of your data. Furthermore, Google is as committed to privacy and security as we are. Since the user information you provided to JotSpot will soon be transferred to Google as part of their acquisition of JotSpot, we want to provide you with the opportunity to retrieve your user information and cease usage of the JotSpot service before the transition. If you do not wish to continue using JotSpot, send an email to privacy@jot.com in the next sixty days and we will reply with instructions for retrieving your user information.

Answers to more frequently asked questions are available at http://www.jot.com/. If you have any other questions, please email support@jot.com.

In closing, we wanted to offer our sincere gratitude to you — our customers — for believing in us and helping us achieve success. We look forward to continuing that relationship at Google.

Best wishes,
The JotSpot Team

Congratulations to the team! I got my first into to JotSpot by Joe Krauss in 2004, which I first hinted at and then could post about.

This is about two groups purposefully linking up to achieve something.

This involves negotiation of boundaries and can be strategic alliances or intra-organisation learning.

Failure often comes from tension and conflict. But boundaries are about difference and hence some of them have to be overcome like different ways of working or concepts of effectiveness.

Resource-dependency theory is one way of thinking about this as you gain power over the dependence on key resources. They need what others offer. It assumes that actions are taken only when they clearly benefit the interests of the group and that impasse results when interests of two groups are not exactly aligned.

Collaborative advantage is a simple rational exchange between parties, about creating joint value. 1+1 > 2. This can only be achieved by building trusting, open and high-commitment relationships.

There are several stages of collaboration:
- Seeking agreement
- Selecting mode
o Legal form
o Number of participants
o Duration
o Range of joint assets
o Range of activities
o Intensity of co-operation
o Distribution of rights
- indentifying and attracting partners
- Evaluation collaborative capability
- Starting work
o Structure
o Action
o Goals
o Accountabilities
- Evaluation collaborative ventures

You should look out at the interdependence of groups as this needs to be equal and noone should only depend on the other. (low, sequential or reciprocal)

There is also a culture in working in a group and you need to foster than and manage it. Policies and culture are important.