Using Google Wave as a guild coordination tool
Confession: I love Google Wave. I think it’s the future of Interwebz communications and have spent every waking second since I was hooked up with an invite exploring and evangelizing the technology.
As repayment for the initial invite, @ibroadfo committed me to doing a post on how I’d utilize Google Wave within my guild. So, here’s what I’m doing:
Truthfully, right now that only thing I’ve settled on is using Wave to consolidate raid strategies for Icecrown. Thanks to Wave’s collaborative features, I can write a full wave of raid strats, each “blip” (box of text) for a specific boss, and include any Waving guildies so they can comment and contribute to formulating a viable technique for each boss.
In each strategy blip I pasted a list of boss availabilities I stole from wowwiki.com. And then added little comments here or there, and highlighted colors to represent if something only really applies in heroic mode, or if it’s something a healer/dispeller needs to pay attention to.
Wave also allows me to embed videos from Youtube, so I can put up kill vids from the ptr.
And of course, others can comment or ask questions about specific bosses and we can work out answers or solutions.
Obviously, there’s still a lot more to do …
The sky’s the limit with Wave and I just need to figure out what else can be done with it within my guild.
I have some ideas but I think that depends on if I can manage to finagle most of the raid core into using this new technology.
Ultimately, Wave is a very powerful collaboration tool and can help streamline any brainstorming processes within your guild that might currently be done (clumsily) in external forums or in-game. Because anyone can add, edit, or contribute to a guild wave, you can do some awesome stuff with them.
Anyone using Wave inside their own guild? I’d be interested to hear how you’re approaching it.
Armory Feed
Google Wave is a great collaboration tool. Due to the extensive nature of boss strat discussions, you might want to consider doing one wave for each Boss and then maybe a master wave with links to the individual ones. Also, check out the Tankspot wave (link below.) It’s got a tool being used in it which allows everyone to view the Youtube video simultaneous, which you might find useful for your guild.
https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BnmfN6NtwF
@Rhidach
2 December 2009 at 1:20 pm #
Oh good point, I should probably split off each blip into a separate wave. And thanks for the link to the tankspot wave!
@Pugtor
2 December 2009 at 2:04 pm #
That’s a cool idea; I’ve been using Google Wave to evaluate houses in my house hunt… hadn’t thought to use it with my other addiction! Time to pass out invites to my guild.
Do you have any plans to open up your waves – or clones of them – to others outside your guild?
@Rhidach
2 December 2009 at 2:24 pm #
I’d like to, but I’m concerned about accidentally letting the wrong person in and dealing with vandalism. Since you can’t kick people off waves yet, it’s safer to limit it to within the guild.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Teuthida, Rhidach. Rhidach said: New post: Using Google Wave as a guild coordination tool – http://tinyurl.com/yzvqgq6 [...]
@Pugtor
2 December 2009 at 3:18 pm #
Fair enough; I suppose you don’t get anything out of cloning a wave and letting that one be shared, as you’d have to manually copy any improvements back to your guild’s wave(s).
Once there are finer-grained access permissions for waves, I look forward to getting to see all this cool stuff you’re doing with it. :)
@Rhidach
2 December 2009 at 3:25 pm #
I might copy the strat waves and make them publicly available to readers of this blog. You’re right, it’d be a shame to hammer out a strat and let it go to waste.
who has that super-cool Calvin gchat icon???
I hadn’t thought of using it yet, but I’m definitely going to try and get that going for my guild’s 10-man alt run.
Thanks for this! I’m trying to lean towards moving all my collaborative guff into Wave, my only problem is convincing people one at a time to try something New and Scary. :)
One thing that would be really useful is some way to read-only embed a wave in another page, so you could duplicate the current single-forum-topic guide by letting people see the current wave…
WTB Google Wave. :P
@ibroadfo – This would fall under the “more granular permissions” I’m guessing Google has yet to implement.
@Rhidach
8 December 2009 at 6:56 pm #
Want an invite? I have a crapload of them now. Just email me your gmail address and I’ll send it.