Blowback ...
There have been times in this industry when new technology applications were both a blessing and curse due to unanticipated consequences. The CIA has a term for this -- "blowback" -- the harmful, unintended future implication to a current action. We're living a classic case of blowback in the EDD world today simply because of the need to deal with billions of emails, attachments, instant messages, Tweets, etc. in an age of defensible electronic record policy. Who knew!? So when Google announced it's new open source platform Wave, my hands started to tremble ...
When my long time colleague Peter Buck brought Google Wave to my attention, it occurred to me that this could be the holy grail we've been looking for. A communication and collaboration tool that wraps together the best of email, instant messaging and web based collaboration portals in an outrageously thoughtful security model spanning both individuals and enterprises. The particularly compelling thing about Wave is its elegant data model, which reflects the native integration of Wave's features. If you haven't seen it, you owe yourself a look.
Back to blowback. IF Google Wave were to catch on, and IF billions of Wave "transactions" were to electronically accumulate, what might be the EDD downside? For example, how would one define a Wave record? Is it the entirety of a multi-party conversation over time or merely a single contribution by a Wave conversation participant? If Wave security is used to establish an ethical wall among Wave conversations, would open source awareness of the security model undermine priviledge? In an e-discovery setting, how would we go about producing a data set containing a Wave conversation which may lose some of its context if it's not reviewed in the interactive manner in which it occurred?
The list could go on and certainly will if Wave becomes popular. If we were to think about potential EDD blowback going into this new paradigm, we might just figure out how to avoid much of the cost and complexity of e-discovery production and review that exists today in our world of ever growing electronic content. Better yet, Google would do well to address formal record declaration in its new platform and provide a simple means through which EDD collection, review and production occurs. Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself.
I raised a "answered" some of these questions in my Wave post a couple months back:
http://dcarns.tumblr.com/post/124969737/google-wave-a-challenge-for-e-discovery
Performing a collection on a Wave conversation should be pretty straightforward, it's the Wave Gadgets and Robots that give me greater concern.
Posted by: David Carns | August 28, 2009 at 05:02 PM