by Sara Sarasohn

This week I ran right into the great divide between what is technically possible - and what people will actually do.

I'm planning a big, complicated event for about 40 people for a volunteer group I belong to. A lot of the work can be done online: RSVPs, distributing volunteer jobs, filling up a schedule of activities. In past years, it's been done with e-mail after e-mail to a big distribution list. I call it the e-mail circus.

 

The e-mail circus is a time-honored tradition in all the volunteer groups I've worked with. Everybody hits reply-all and copy-paste and we clog up our in-boxes. The week before the event nobody knows what's going on because there have been so many redundant and contradictory messages we've all stopped reading them. My colleague Wright Bryan points out this also happens all the time NPR. He's right. The e-mail circus is a feature, or a bug, of contemporary life.

This year, I'd talked to my co-planner about avoiding the e-mail circus by using some more sophisticated online tools. They aren't even that sophisticated, just slightly less blunt instruments. We already use Yahoo Groups for the e-mail circus. Inside the Yahoo group I could make a database for the volunteer jobs, use the calendar to work on the schedule of events, even take polls about what kinds of events people want to have.

Then I thought about this spring, when I'd put some Mp3s up on Box.net for another group. I think Box.net is the easiest of the Web-based file sharing sites. They have big, clearly-labeled buttons for streaming and downloading. Still, I had to field questions from people who had never encountered that kind of file-sharing site. I was happy to answer their questions. Box.net is simple for what it is, but there are some people for whom it's just a little too complicated.

That's fine. There are a lot of things that are too complicated for me in tech. I wouldn't want to be the person answering my questions about Linux or World of Warcraft. On top of the event planning for this big event I have coming up, I didn't want to be the person answering questions about shared databases on Yahoo groups.

I believe - in life, not just in tech - that you have to meet people where they are. A system or a tool or a piece of software only works if it works for the people who are trying to use it. If the users can't figure it out, it's broken or useless. I want people to enjoy the event I'm planning. I don't want them to get so frustrated with the planning databases that they figure they might as well just not show up at the event.

In the end, my co-planner and I decided to use Google Docs just for the two of us, so we can keep track of what we are doing. We like the word and spreadsheet functions.

I'd still like to scale down the e-mail circus. I guess I'll just have to think very carefully before I hit reply-all.