Let Everyone Participate!
Permissions and Controls limit Communication. Let Everyone Participate
In reference to: “Preview 2: Highrise permissions and groups”
37 signals decided to default to let everyone view anything posted within their new contact management application. Knowing that some people wanted to make certain things private, they put in the functionality for an individual contact to be limited to the poster, certain people, or a group.
This makes a lot of sense. Let the person who is posting something figure out permissions. Big permission schemas (which I find in big programs like Sharepoint) are a PAIN IN THE ASS. Seriously. And they take the wrong approach… by default they assume people should be limited in what they can see. I like this “default to everyone” approach.
Of course, you should impose some limits on who can change what. My idea would be to let everyone be able to change everything with approval of the author (except for admins).
Jason from 37 signals has a great post about control vs. communication:
[in reference to customers] ” They’re almost always asking how to prevent someone from doing something.”
“Preventing someone from saying or doing something often breaks these free flowing communication channels and introduces miscommunication or silence—two cancers of collaboration.”
When they ask how to prevent people from doing this or that I usually reply with something like “Have you tried asking them not to do this or that? If you don’t want them to upload files just ask them not to. If you don’t want them to create to-do lists just ask them not to. Communicate with them as you would if you weren’t using software.”