Why Indaba?

Final approach, Changi Airport.

Why you will like putting your work in the cloud: it’s oh-dark-thirty and you’ve just landed. You’ve got three hours to kill before your next flight, so you wander over to the public Internet terminal, and open a Web browser. You can now:

• Wade through two days of email in the hopes of getting a sense of whether your project has gone off the rails without you in the office.

• Log in to a realtime progress report on your project. An alert list has case reports on the issues your team has flagged as needing your attention. Further down the page, you scan a list of each assignment currently in flight, sorted by due date and linked to the actual in-progress content.

We’re building option two. The Indaba partners have been using similar systems since 2002. At the time, we didn’t know that this was called “cloud computing” or “software as a service.” But it made difficult work cheaper and faster, so we used it.

Suddenly “online collaboration” is quite the zeitgeist. Notable entries include Google Docs, Basecamp and Salesforce.com, each of which provide a quality service in their niche. Even that old warhorse Microsoft Office is putting documents online (sort of). Why is Indaba different, much less better?

Indaba does a few things that no existing services do, and we believe it puts the basics of online collaboration together in a way that no one can match.

First of all, Indaba is not intended to be a universal solution:

• For a quick collaborative writing project, use a Google Doc or EtherPad.
• For an online file portal at a small org, use Open Atrium or Basecamp; at a big one, use WebEx.
• For relationship management, use CiviCRM or Salesforce.com.

But you should talk to us if:

• You are creating content that requires input from lots and lots of people.
• You are writing similar reports in lots of places.
• You are writing similar reports in one place, but many times.
• You want to build structured, interconnected research projects, without hiring a database admin.
• You need to do a lot of work with minimal support staff.
• You need to engage part time contributors with little to no tech training.
• You need to work from anywhere, including very slow Internet terminals.
• You want to publish your work to the Web, or export data or text quickly and easily.

Indaba excels at taming complex projects and making the chaos of a large collaboration visible, measurable and manageable.

In particular, Indaba embraces the concept of workflow: the idea that projects will run better if each deliverable has a defined path through the organization from author to editor to final approval. Creating these paths, even on paper, tends to make organizations run better. But with Indaba, each workflow (designed by the project manager in the Designer app) can trigger automatic events, like reminder emails, overdue alerts and assignment queues that make the process repeatable at large scale. Structured workflows allow progress to be charted and completion dates to be estimated on the fly.

If you’re trying to put out reports on dozens or hundreds of targets, you need to have structure. And as a manger, you need a way to see into the guts of that living organism. And if managing simultaneous reporting or fieldwork in dozens of cities seems downright impossible, well…

Indaba does that. It does that really, really well.