Workstreaming

Workstreaming is a way to enhance communications in teams that work in a dispersed fashion. As a term, workstreaming is derived from lifestreaming, a way to show activities of a person by creating an automatically updated list of photos, bookmarks and other internet information published by the user. With workstreaming, a similar stream is created by collecting the worker's progress reports, meeting schedules and other things relevant to team communication.

Once set up, the benefit of a workstream is giving team members a "peripheral vision" to activities of their fellow team members. It can also be used by management to monitor the overall progress.

Workstreaming software

• ididwork.com provides a dedicated web-based workstreaming system
  
• Tempo time tracker provides workstreaming features
  
• Workstreamr is a workstreaming service that is currently in beta
  
• Micro-blogging services like Jaiku and Twitter may to some extent be used for workstreaming

Related software

Software project collaboration tools like Trac often provide a kind of specialized workstream showing activities like version control commits and bug reports by users of the software. However this cannot be considered as a full workstream as it does not include workstream items collected from external sources.