Table of Contents

• About Co-Work
  • Introduction
  • Features
  • Benefits
  • Co-Task Definition
  • Tips
• Further details available via 'Help' when you Enter Co-Work

Introduction

Work is often done via dialog, where members of a working community cooperate with each other to achieve shared goals. I make some progress, describe it, ask a question or request some help, and send it off to you. To make progress as a community of co-workers, it is necessary for you to respond to the request, by answering the question or perhaps carrying out the request and sending some result back to me, perhaps asking for another response or another step in the process. And if you notice that I'm blocked, you can try to help me make progress. A community gets a lot more done than the members can do by themselves.

Co-Work™ operates like a cooperative workflow system. Members can require responses from each other by using the RSVP feature. And everyone can see each other's message queues and share concerns and help each other.

In this way, a community's shared goals and active responsible progress are constructed through a dialog that encourages and requires responsiveness.

Features

• Co-Work is in use, providing benefits.
• You can sign up here for a Co-Work account to communicate with Sprex people.
• You can log in to Co-Work after you validate your e-mail address.
• When you log in to Co-Work, you can access either or both the sales and/or support roles in Sprex. Your contacts in Sprex will respond.
• Messages (known as Co-Tasks) can optionally be tagged RSVP, Important, and/or Urgent.
• Communications are logged individually for each user; you can view your log as well as your message queue(s).
• Co-Work supports a number of communities. Each community has its own members and a set of shared queues of messages exchanged among them.
• A "News" link reports the traffic levels (message counts) in users' queues. You can see who has an accumulation of un-responded-to messages.
• Queues are mostly like email inboxes, but one queue, named "log", is more like an accounting system with double-booking of each message (when sent by who to whom, what; how disposed, when.
• Many outsiders can share the same Co-Work email+password (e.g., a whole company that is a Sprex customer).
• Logs are rotated based on rules (daily for internal logs).
• No rejection function is implemented in which the original sender of a cleared message can reject an incomplete explanation for why a message was cleared (i.e., an outstanding issue/task report was omitted). Instead, simply re-reply to that cleared Co-Task and ask for a more complete answer.

• Co-Work enforces respectful, responsible responsiveness within its communities by implementing an RSVP feature. Messages can be sent with an RSVP Yes tag, and users are required to respond to RSVP-tagged messages before they can be deleted and considered resolved. Otherwise, the message stays in your face so that it gradually becomes more difficult to ignore it than to respond to it.
• Co-Work provides shared awareness not only by serving as a communications medium, but also by allowing members of the community to see each others' messages, and to see counts of each others' message queues, so that they can help if necessary where issues are blocked or exert some constructive peer pressure if that is necessary to help people engage responsibly.
• Customers (and participants in our communities) that prefer not to have their responsiveness supported or paid attention to can and should make that preference known, and then other members of the community should be careful not to send them RSVP-yes-tagged messages.
• Co-Work shares many of the benefits of Instant Messaging, and builds on them:
  1. voice displacement (avoiding the need and improving the productivity for many conversations/meetings),
  2. side-channeling (allowing team interactions during other events),
  3. immediacy (everyone on the team can get their messages at the same time -- no irregular delivery),
  4. 911-like (use Co-Work to share and document responses to urgent issues),
  5. integration (Co-Work helps new and part-time team members maintain continuity with a dynamic team),
  6. find-me service (Co-Work contains a configurable SMS-gateway to notify users of high-priority or urgent Co-Tasks in some or all topics),
  7. expertise on demand (Co-Work allows team members to rapidly interact with experts and helps schedule other interactions),
  8. self-service (Co-Work is something any team/group member can do and both feel and demonstrate productivity).
  (This list was adapted from that in the NetworkWorldFusion Feature: Eight benefits of IM, by Christine Perey.)