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Folders vs. Tags For Shared Email Accounts?
binarybum writes "I run a student organization with a 10-member 'board of directors.' We hardly ever all have time to attend meetings and a large part of how we interact with the student body is through email. We have a shared email account (accessible by the 10 of us on the board) right now that is typically accessed through an outlook web-access portal. We've been attempting to keep things organized in the account through a complex collection of folders that have been tacked on ad libum. It's turned into a complete mess. I have the onerous task of restructuring the folder system in hopes of achieving sustainable organization, but I'm wondering if I should just switch us over to a tagging system — perhaps Gmail. Has anyone used tags for a multi-user account successfully or does it end up being just as messy?"
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I'm in the board of a student organisation as well, together with 6 other people. We all have our own e-mail account and one catch-all account. The abactis is in charge of all mail (snail and e) and has her own computer with all of the e-mail accounts via IMAP open. There she can drag and drop e-mail and keep a look at all mail.
Use a message board.
Emails don't really fit into the folder structure very well because they might belong to several groupings at the same time, thus requiring multiple copies or shortcuts/links to an original (which most email programs don't do). Tags are definitely better for this since an email can have many tags at once.
Here's another idea you might, or might not, like:
Use GMail, or similar, for a group of accounts, one of which is the main, public address. This main account auto-forwards to the 10 member accounts, much like a list-serve. Replies from a member are CC'ed to the main account (set the rules right, or you could end up with an endless loop!!) and the 'Reply To:' field from the members is to the main account. This way, everybody gets everything, the group account is still the focal point, and everybody is responsible for keeping their own account organized.
If a single person is responsible for all of this (you?), you can set it up such that you are the one who can make changes to all the accounts and the others only have emailing privileges (but I haven't thought this part out and it may be difficult with some systems). One thing to consider if you use this is to either have an agreement (which some will break) or a setup that does not allow the users to use this account setup with out the CC'ing. This prevents them from using the account for personal or nefarious reasons.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
There is absolutely no reason to share emails in this organization.
The secretary's job is not just the completion of the minutes. But to organize and forward on information that is required for the board. Information that is supposed to represent the boards point of view should go through the same single point.
Ad hoc access to, filtering of, replying to and otherwise manipulating the email is broken. One of the symptoms of that brokenness is the problem you are seeing now.
Fix the culture, the rest will follow.
I completely agree. We established a Google Group for the board I am on, and find it is ideal. Collaberative documents can be shared using Google Docs, we can post other important files to the group page as well, etc. If anything, it means that we can just email the group's email list, instead of having to CC all members for every important conversation.
I also manage e-communication at a university for a large student group (13-person exec board & 40+ non-exec members). Each exec member has his own committee to communicate with as well as the entire exec board. This year my university adopted Google Apps, and most of our members had Google accounts anyway. So we had each exec member use either their own personal Google account or a university google account. All e-mails or organized privately by each individual in his own account. Google Docs is where we do most of our collaboration. This means that there's no work for me to keep each person organized because that's his own responsibility, and people have the freedom to organize their tags or folders as they please. I don't even have to manage sharing rights--each exec member chooses with whom to share all his own Google Docs documents and spreadsheets.
The point: I highly recommend going with Google: Gmail+chat, Google Docs, Calendar, and Google groups (which I use heavily in another student group). You could have your group e-mail automatically forward to each person, or you can have your group email be a Google Groups email address.
The major draw back of this approach: learning curve. Don't underestimate people's desire to keep doing things the way they've always done it. Just adopting a strategy doesn't solve the problem. it's not that people are lazy or dumb. They're just trying to manage their time efficiently. If you want to transition people to a new system, you have to work one-on-one with each person.
I agree with the parent. I think it's obvious that email isn't the ideal solution here. Scale this up even a little more (say 25 people) and it's obvious that a shared email account isn't the answer. A forum, as noted, might be appropriate or even looking into to other solutions like 37signal-esque stuffs like Basecamp and Backpackit, might work.
My suggestion(which is what worked for me collaborating on my capstone project) is that each person gets a single folder with their name on it.And then tags will be used in the central workspace for any projects and also each individual is allowed to tag the emails in his/her own folder as they wish. This gives everyone their own workspace and allows them to organize that workspace how they like,while at the same time giving all a central workspace for ongoing collaborative projects. This also cuts down on arguing about layout as everyone gets their own little niche to set up as they please and you only have to get them to agree to a few common tags for the common workspace. Our common tags were IIRC "things we would like to have"
Anyway our system really helped us to get a handle on things while allowing each individual to organize his personal area to what suited him best. Oh,and when you have meetings a similar approach works well in real life. We had our area set up in a Round Robin configuration which allowed those of us with laptops to easily share them with the two that didn't while zinging ideas off each other and at the same time giving us a central area where one of us could go and stand when he wanted to present an idea to the group while having their undivided attention. But I guess it would all depend on your group dynamics so YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
With 10 people on one email account, it's hardly surprising that it turned into a clusterfuck.
Hear, hear!
Corporate emails at my work consist of endless top-posting after re-top-posting that must be read from the bottom to the top to make any sense of the mess. In the process, I need to skip over multiple re-inclusions of the same email, and not get annoyed that the entire mess mostly consists of disclaimers. LookOut seems to strongly encourage this technique of mis-communication.
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant disclaimer."
"What is the disclaimer standing on?"
"But it's disclaimers all the way down!" (sorry Stephen Hawking.)