Last night our own Sergey Lipnevich gave a talk to the New York office about Trac:

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects.

Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission; to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team×?Ts established development process and policies.

Trac combines an issue-tracker, source control tool, and wiki all in one, with surpising elegance and simplicity. The wiki concept is really embedded deep in Trac and woven throughout; wiki tags can be used in source code checkin comments, bug ticket descriptions, project plans (aka roadmaps), and of course on plain old wiki pages within Trac.

Seeing this application got me thinking about how people within an organization work together; specifically the obstacles we normally put in their way. Luckily someone much brighter than I has thought much harder about this topic. His name is Andrew McAfee, professor at HBS, and while he uses the goofy term “Enterprise 2.0″ a lot, the rest of what he says is fairly insightful.

A recent post on his blog entitled The Mechanisms of Online Emergence summarizes this idea nicely:

When I talk about Enterprise 2.0 with company management teams, industry groups, and executive education students I usually start by asking people to raise their hands if it’s easier for them to find what they want on their company’s Intranet than it is on the public Internet.

No one has ever raised their hand.

I then ask them to think about how strange this is. Their Intranets are infinitesimally small compared to the Internet, and they’re also usually built and maintained over time by well-paid professionals. At many larger companies, in fact, the Intranet is the responsibility of a dedicated group whose job is to organize the site and make things easy to find.

I next ask how people find what they’re looking for on the Internet. Everyone responds “Google.” (most people are polite enough to refrain from adding “duh.”)

That post outlines how emergence happens online and how it can be fostered (harnessed?) inside an organization.

Or, re-stated here:

Large groups of strangers are coming together on the Web, interacting productively, and generating some very valuable outputs without encountering a lot of obvious workflow, gatekeeping, credentialing, or oversight when they try to join in and start contributing.

So here’s the obvious question: why should employees of the same organization require or benefit from more of these constraints than a large bunch of strangers scattered across the Web?

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