How I would design a forms workflow system for google wave

Yesterday, I posted a quick reply to a post on the google wave developer blog about creating a form based workflow system for google wave.  I was quite busy at the time and i think in my haste I may have been a bit brusque.    By way of making amends, here is how I would set up such a system.

A forms workflow engine needs a number of components in order to operate correctly.  In particular:

1. A way of specifying relationships between people.  The Manager-Employee relationship is probably the most important here, but there are others too (like whom is in the HR department).
2. A way of specifying what information is needed in the form.  What fields, how they are validated, that sort of thing.  Calculated fields would be important here.
3. A way of specifying the workflow for the form, and working out which relationships to use and which form to use in that workflow.
4. A way for a participant in a group to select which form he wants to fill in.  A particular person may be engaged in multiple organisations, so having a single form library to choose from isn't enough

All of this could be managed in Google Wave, but it would not be trivial.  If set up correctly, it could work quite smoothly however.  First, we need a bot that performs multiple functions, or multiple bots that co-operate to provide the functions listed above.  I think it would be more understandable for users to just have one bot, so lets use that model.  For the purposes of this discussion, I'll call it FormBot.

Next, we need a way of creating the models that are specified above.  An operator would create a wave, tag it with its function (so that the bot can tell what purpose the wave serves) and then adds FormBot to the wave.  FormBot adds a gadget to the wave which allows the operator to edit the data.

For the relationship diagram, the gadget/bot combo would be able to work out which users they were dealing with by looking at the participants of the wave.  This effectively becomes your personnel database, in lieu of having it hooked up to an LDAP server.  The gadget would then allow the operator to drop people into relationships.  The robot would detect any changes, and then suck up the information into its own database (this bit is quite important, as it is how the bot, when processing an instance of a form, will be able to find the information in needs).

The Form & Workflow models are linked together in a one-one relationship, so they can be added on another wave, this time tagged with workflowmodel.  There would be a couple of gadgets to allow the models to be edited, which are then sucked into the database again.

So finally, how does the bot process an instance of a workflow form?  A user would have an extension installed on his client which adds an entry to the "new wave" menu which would say "New Form".  This would create a new wave and add FormBot.  FormBot would check its database to see what Form Waves it has which are linked to relationship models with the user as a participant.  It would then present these as a list to the user to allow him to choose which form he wanted to fill in.  The Bot would then create the form and allow the user to edit it and progress through the workflow.  

In summary, what we've done here is create a couple of setting waves that the bot uses to configure the application, and to allow it to provide different form libraries to different groups of people.  I think its quite elegant and would work really well.  There'd be a lot of work to get it implemented though.  The gadgets to allow the editing of the models would be the key bit.  I'd love to do it but I doubt I'll find enough time to do it myself.  I did create a proof of technology some time ago, but it wasn't configurable, nor did it hook up to a proper user database.

Google wants a workflow engine/robot for wave too.

Google just posted on their Wave Developer Blog that their "wishlist" would have on it a way to process document workflow using google wave.  This reminds me of a post I wrote a while back on what google wave could be used for.  I did a proof of concept, but taking the concept to production would take too much effort for one guy in his spare time.  Probably the biggest barrier is integrating with HR systems.  How does the system plug into your corporate HR system to work out who your manager is when you post?

Either way, its good to see that other people see the same value in wave that I do.

My google wave post just broke :( but google fixed it :)

About 3 months ago, I wrote a google wave gadget, which allows users to collaboratively work on a google wave gadget within google wave.  I've gotten a bit of publicity out of it and its all been great.   Sadly, tonight, the wave that I created to document my gadget has crapped itself, collapsing under the publicity of its own popularity, with more than 200 blips and 500 participants.   The main blip in the wave now has no content whatsoever, and I can't view its history to repair its view.

This is a bad sign.  I like google wave, and I want to support it as a new way of communicating that is easy, effective and efficient.  The problem is that I can't trust it.  If its going to destroy information on me, how can I rely upon it?  Sure, its in beta at the moment, and I probably shouldn't complain, but I'm disappointed.  Its got a truckload of participants now, and I understand that that brings a lot of complexity, but I don't want to loose data.  If I could restore its state it would be fine... The really sad thing is that I'm due to deliver a presentation on my gadget tomorrow night, espousing how good google wave is and how it can be used.   What am I going to do now?

Time to address reliability issues Google.

Update: I've asked google to look into the problem, and it looks like somebody accidentally deleted all of the content in the wave.  This could have been a simple PEBKAC, or a more complex interaction of network latency causing the google wave software to do something unexpected.  It is beta software after all, so these things are to be expected.  It wouldn't be a problem at all, except I can't get access to playback to retrieve an older copy.

Never fear however, the dynamic chaps at google have had a look at my wave, and apparently there are over 30000 revisions to it.  This was a bit much for the javascript engine's tiny little brain and it broke.  They've fixed it now, and all is back as it was.  Thanks Christian!

I'm part of a presentation on developing Google Wave extensions, Wed 27th of Jan at RMIT

The local Melbourne chapter of GTUG is hosting a meeting around developing extensions for Google Wave this wednesday at RMIT.  The big presenter there will be Pamela Fox, Google's developer relations person, but I've been asked to give a quick run down at the end on my experiences developing a mind map gadget.  If I get time, I might also theorise about how wave could be used to provide ad-hoc communications focused tools inside business.

If you'd like to come along, please register here.  Its open to everyone.

New Version of Google Wave MindMap Gadget available

I've just updated my Google Wave Mind Map gadget to a new version.  New features include:

• It renders graphically now, so things are a little prettier
• It won't work on Firefox versions earlier than 3.0.  If you are running an earlier version I strongly suggest that you upgrade
• There is now the ability to edit properties, accessable via the properties menu button.
• There is a context menu that can be used to access the menu, accessible via the Right Mouse button.
• You can change the colour of nodes. There's also the ability to edit the background colour, but this is currently unused.
• You can change the outline of nodes:
• Underline
• Circle
• Cloud
• You can change the direction of layout of the root node. Where is places nodes is a bit random, and I do plan on fixing this
• You can specify whether nodes are collapsed upon intial view or not.
• Upload/Download now supports non-ASCII characters, such as Cyrillic

Its not perfect, and there are a few things that need to be fixed, but it is an improvement on the old version so I thought I'd release it. If thre are any problems, please do not hesitate to let me know. I can easily revert it back to the old version if its really broken, or issue quick patches.


I'd be delighted to hear your feedback.

Google Wave for EJA Enterprise Futures Forum 09

A lot of people are saying that using Google Wave to discuss conferences live is the new hotness. Given that there will be a special google wave announcement at tomorrow's Enterprise Futures Forum in Melbourne, I'm willing to guess there will be waves for the conference.

In anticipation, I have created a wave for the tech discussion session I am running on local implications for cloud computing. There's not much there at the moment. I'm hoping to bulk it out a bit this afternoon and tonight in prep for tomorrow's conference.

What should I do when google wave topics become too popular/cluttered?

The other day, I released a mind mapping gadget for google wave, and its proven to be quite popular. Popular for something I knocked together quickly anyway. There's an active wave discussing features, which also serves as the main description of the gadget. Its getting a bit long now, and I'm aware that there is a limit to how big waves can get before they start to slow down. It also gets to the point where I want to simplify things so that a new reader coming upon the wave doesn't get confused by the threads of conversation there.

The way that I am using wave at the moment is that there is a single shared document at the top (the root blip) which contains the topic of discussion, and in this case, a mind map of features and votes for features. The blips that come afterwards are a discussion list, much in the same way that comments can be added to blog posts. Whilst they form an important part of the wave, the value of information they contain decreases as they become less topical. It is really the latest comments and blips that are the important bit, at least to people that are returning to long running conversations.

Other systems show the most recent comments on the top, and show older comments on separate pages to stop the page from getting to big. I'm tempted to suggest that wave should do the same thing, but I wonder if its because we're all still figuring out the best way to use wave. Are there different usage patterns for waves that means it makes sense to have every single blip on the screen, even if it means the page is three miles long? I'm still mulling that one, but in the mean time I think there is a need to come up with a way of managing long running waves. Here's my thoughts on how it could be done.

Option 1: Create a new wave to "Continue Discussion". This is what most people seem to be doing at the moment, but it means that anybody who has linked to the page is now linking to (or embeding) a dead version of it, and would then need to click through to see the new version. It also breaks the fundamental principle of URLs in that a URL represents an object for its lifetime.

Option 2: Delete the old crufty posts. That's not very nice to the people that wrote those posts in the first place. Besides, those comments provide useful context for a new reader to be able to catch up with the rest of the people on the wave. In the end, you are removing information from the system, rather than presenting it in an accessible way, and thats never a good idea.

Option 3: Have an archival bot participant on the wave. This bot would monitor the wave, and when the number of blips starts to get high, it would progressively copy the older blips into an archive wave and subsequently delete them from the original. It would also add a link to the end of the root blip showing people where the archive wave is.

I've had a quick look to see if anyone has done this yet, and I haven't found anything, but I think its a great idea. The only technical issue with this approach that I see at the moment is that the archived blips would not have the same author(s) as the original blips, as it would be the bot that authored them. The bot could add some text indicating who the authors were, but its not quite the same.

I really like the idea of the archival bot. Once I get back from Sydney I might give it a go.

Mind Map Gadget for Google Wave

As you can probably tell by my recent posts, I've been mucking about with Google Wave for the last week or so.  It shows a lot of promise, but we still need to work out the best way to use it.

Some colleagues and I were discussing some practice development the other day.  One of them said that they had created a mind map on mind42.com and had shared it with us so that we could map out some ideas.  Mind42 is a great tool and normally I would jump straight on it, but it seemed unnatural to leave the context which we had created in the wave.  It would have been much cooler if we could have had the mind map directly in the wave.

Google has thought of this, and have included the ability to incorporate gadgets into your wave, which allow essentially any web application to participate in waves.  A Mind map is a natural tool to include in waves as it forms the start of a lot of collaborations, which is exactly what wave is for.  Rather than wait for mind42 to change their application so that it could be embedded in google wave, I decided to write my own.  Mind maps are relatively straight forward applications, and I wanted an excuse to use GWT in anger.

The result is my newly released google wave component.  I've uploaded it to the Google Wave samples gallery, but if you have access to the wave preview then you can go directly to the source (With a sample) at this wave link.  Install, have a play, and make suggestions for improvements.  I'm hoping we'll start using it within our organisation as well.

Here's a video of it in action:

Does Google Wave herald the arrival of natural language interaction with computers?

I've been spending some time recently thinking about Google Wave, and how it can be useful as a method of communicating and working with multiple participants at the same time, which is what Wave is for, but with a robot as one of those participants.  Wave provides an easy way to incorporate a computer participant in a conversation with people, getting it to receive all updates to the wave and provide its own input.  By doing this it makes performing workflow like tasks much easier, and brings the computer system into the conversation with the humans, rather than having the humans interact with a computer system.

In my example, everybody has a "manager" to which their leave application must be sent before it can be approved.  The bot would detect when you were finished with your application and automatically add in your manager for approval.  This works great, but it needs to know who your manager is.  This information is stored in the HR system, which has its own user interface and logins and whatnot.  If you change manager, somebody with admin privileges on the HR system would need to go in and change your record in that UI.  This breaks the paradigm of bringing the computer into the conversation with humans.

For my demo, I was planning on writing a little user interface for my bot.  It was going to be a web application which allowed any user to go in and play with their manager, so that they could try out the different permutations of the workflow.  Then I got thinking: Why should somebody need to leave the conversation in wave to make changes to the leave system?  Why should they have to interact with yet another user interface?  I already had put in some basic capability for it to tell you your leave balance if you asked it, so why not extend that even further?

Imagine the following scenario:

Bob is having a discussion with Jane about planning for the next release of their product on google wave.  They have a query about upcoming leave for the staff because they might need to cancel leave in order to meed deadlines.  In order to do this, they have to get a list of users on the project, log onto the HR system, and perform queries on each of those users.  They went to the HR systems world, rather than bringing the HR system into their conversation.

Wouldn't it be cool if Bob could talk to the HR system instead?  he could add the HR bot to the wave, and say something like:

Hey HRBot, what is the upcoming leave for the following users:

• Mary 
• John
• Simon

The bot could then parse the question, send the request to the HR system web services, and provide a response directly in the wave so that both Bob and Jane can see the results.  Any leave requests would be listed as links to the request waves that submitted those requests, so Bob could quickly check to see how important that leave is or ask the users if it is okay to cancel that leave.

People have been trying to get natural language systems going for decades, and its still really really hard.  When I was a postgraduate student, I entered the Loebner Prize competition with a colleague of mine, Jason Hutchens.  The purpose of the Loebner Prize is to encourage people to write a bot that is capable of fooling humans that they are talking to a person instead of a computer.  This is impossibly difficult of course, and pretty silly really as Marvin Minsky has pointed out, but its a good bit of fun to write a chatterbot.  The bot that comes closest to being human wins an annual prize of $2000.  Natural language processing was Jason's area of research and he had won the prize before so we decided we'd have a crack.

We lost (curse you Ellen Degeneres!), but sold the software to a german company that wanted to put chatterbot robots on company's web sites as level-0 helpdesk for a sum considerably more than we would have won as prizemoney.  In the end, they had difficulty in selling the software and I don't think it ever really went anywhere.   The range of language that the bot was expected to deal with was very broad which makes parsing it exponentially more difficult, plus websites those days weren't really sophisticated enough to support that level of interaction.

These days, I think there is more of a case for using natural language parsing bots within narrow contexts (to keep the complexity down).  Salesforce have an interesting demo which shows the sort of thing that I am talking about within Wave.  They talk about customer interaction, but I think it will be more useful within an organisation.

In the future, I think we'll see more and more of these bots participating in our business practices.  They can enrich the information we type (for example, by putting in contextual links into what we type, bringing up supporting reports and figures when we are performing tasks, that sort of thing), plus they can become active participants in the procedures while still giving us control over what is going on.



P.S. I feel terrible that I have used cancelling leave as an example here.  I would never advocate cancelling leave as a valid project management technique.  Its a terrible thing to do to your staff, and you should never do it.  Its only used as an example.

Using Google Wave for Workflow tasks

I've been thinking over the last few days about what Google Wave could be used for. Obviously it can be used as a document collaboration and review platform. It can also be used as a multi-user chat program, although there are probably other existing programs that are just as good for managing that. Some people have claimed that it isn't anything revolutionary. In and of itself, this is true, as it just takes concepts already available in email, instant messaging and collaborative documents and puts them together. What I'm more interested in now however is what we can do with it now that it has brought those technologies together.

In a blog post, Daniel tenner quite succinctly outlines where Google Wave will be useful, and primarily its going to be used by people working together. Why couldn't we use it to do workflow related stuff too, especially when there is an automated component to it? I decided to look at how we could do leave forms. The first question I asked was "why would you want to do leave forms in wave?". There are already web applications for doing workflow. The problem that I see with that is that they are still fairly rigid in their operation. Whenver your manager is on leave or you want to go slightly outside the pre-defined workflow thats there the procedure becomes very brittle and you need to go to a user with superuser access to get things done. In addition to this, all notifications that you have new forms to attend to or that the status has changed go out by email. Email shouldn't be a notification system. We just use it that way because its familiar, and it is the tool that we spend most of our time in.

Assuming that google wave becomes popular enough that we use it each day, wouldn't it be nice if the workflow/collaboration tool entered into our messaging tool. That way we wouldn't need to log into a separate tool to manage things. It would be there in front of us, and allow us to deal with the situation immedaitely.

To test this theory, and also to play with Google Wave bots, I have written an extension to Google wave, which gives users the option to create a Leave application in google wave. Interestingly enough, I found it easiest to document the procedure directly in Wave, which would make it very easy to introduce new users to our procedures. The procedure wave is available at Leave Application Procedure. One nice thing about this is that if HR needs to change the procedure, It automatically pops back up in people's inbox so that they see the changes. There's no need for notifications to be sent out, as the change to the document (to which everyone is subscribed) automatically gets distributed. Likewise, if a staff member has a question on the procedure, it can be asked directly in the wave itself (privately if necessary) to provide context to the conversation.

When a user creates a new leave form wave, it automatically includes a bot which is responsible for progressing the wave through the workflow. This is done by a series of buttons (or actions) at the bottom of the document which take the standard approval route (Draft -> Submitted -> Approved -> Processed). It is flexible however, as anyone that needs to deviate from the process, say to get additional approval from another team leader because he is to another team, can simply add the other team leader to the wave and have a chat. All of the context associated with the process are kept with the wave, and it can easily be searched later on to see what happens.

Its also possible for the bot to take a greater role in the process itself. It can check leave balances (assuming that the leave system is available to it), add leave to the company leave calendar, and any number of other integration tasks because it is the thing that is managing the workflow itself. Its very flexible, easy to change, and completely under the control of the organisation. One thing I played with was getting the bot to understand (as best as bots can) natural language. If you wanted to query your leave balance for example you could start a wave with the bot and ask it "What is my leave balance". It would could then look up your balance and reply. This would be able to free up HR staff from having to perform mundane tasks. Obviously bots have got a long way to go before they can understand our language properly, but if queries conform to simple grammar rules then it should work.

If anyone would like to have a play with what I have written, let me (brucejcooper@googlewave.com) know and I will add you to the procedure wave, which will allow you to install the extension and create a dummy leave application. It puts me in as the approver for everyone (except for me, for whom it uses another bloke) as their manager. Only the manager can approve/reject a timesheet. If you say anything to the bot, it replies with a message about your leave balance (which is bogus. the bot isn't connected to our HR system).

What does everyone think? Is this a good idea for managing workflow? Until we have broader access for people to get on Wave it will be difficult to tell, but I think it is a good use.

P.S. I wrote this post in Wave originally, but had to copy and paste it here because the embedding API doesn't allow anonymous viewing yet.  Google Wave is great, but it is still definitely a beta product.

UPDATE: I've created a screencast demonstration of how the flow will work.  Remember this is intended as a proof of concept rather than the full thing, but it gets the point across.