I have been using google wave for managing few discussions and thought it would be good to share it with every one else.

First a bit of context -

Most of the teams I am part of (tech/sales/business) are distributed. Some people are in different timezones and hence managing a all-hands meeting/discussion is kind of tricky. Off course most of the things are taken care of over emails, but when you are at a particular milestone, its important to organize discussions in more disciplined manner.  So far meeting organizer would publish agenda 2 days ahead of time over email, or publish it on some sort of dashboard. Everybody goes through agenda, prepare their pre-meeting notes and bullet points. Then we conduct a voice conference using conference bridge or multi-party skype call. During meeting, everybody is taking down minutes, notes and publishing them after meeting is over. Meeting organizer will gather such feedback, inputs from every one and publish it as a road-map and follow up items. So far this worked well. But Google wave just helps us to make this a bit better.

How to use Google wave? Or rather how we are using it.

We create one wave and invite all concerned people (participants, observers, boards) to that wave. Meeting organizer will put down agenda as first message. Every body puts down their pre-meeting notes, inputs and organizer will keep on refining agenda taking this feedback. Any documents, links (including links to JIRA/Basecamp/Unfuddle) are posted to this first message. During meeting, we start talking about each bullet point from agenda message one by one. Call is still organized over skype or conf-bridge, but we make sure every body has access to wave during the call, so that minutes, notes are typed right there. So once meeting begins and every body has introduced, we start creating a message for each bullet point. Every body posts their thoughts, notes as we speak to this message as a reply. Once the meeting is completed, organizer will put up a concluding message on the wave with summary. No need to collate all minutes, as they happen in real time as we are speaking.

Benefit -

Typically most of us receive about 70-80 odd emails everyday. It is pain to keep track of all of them and their replies and play them back. Play back feature of wave is just a winner on its own! Second, we can attach various things to email, but we can embed them in wave. A slight difference, but a major benefit to make sure you can put context of the document and the document itself right next to each other. Real time notes sharing reduces time required to go through all of them and summarize. Since our use of wave is still limited, its easy to search through it much faster.

Typically we conduct road-map discussions for existing projects/products we are working on. This includes business discussions + technology. We also use this for preparing for a sales meeting and also for a sales meeting itself, when ever possible.

Hope this helps.