Developing and managing a research lab is one of the greatest difficulties I’ve found as a professor. As a social scientist its not as common and I’ve had to turn to my colleagues in engineering for guidence. But the idea and function of a lab doesnt translate the same. In Anthropology we dont collaborate on large multi-authored papers, they dont write in LaTax, and we’re not used to realtime collaborative communication that goes into editing code. Therefore I’ve had some issues with developing a streamlined means of communication for the lab. After about three years of bouncing around we’ve settled on WhatsApp and I’m still not satisfied.

I attempted to use Slack as my intial means of communication. I thought it was a great move because it has a clean interface, the ability upload documents and links, integration with dozens of apps, and a DM function – plus it works on just about every platform. Immediately there was hesitation; students didnt want to have to download and monitor another app. 

Communication on the app went pretty smooth for about a year. The one caveat I was given was not to create more than one channel. We were able to quickly reschedule lab meetings, celebrate birthdays, and share event details and grants deadlines. But as the lab expanded, more students were unfamilar with Slack and some students turned off notifications, missing key communications. I had a couple minor gripes as well, like not having a home base for common links but overall I thought it was going well.

At my students’ overwhelming request we moved to WhatsApp. I was resistant but gave it. I think it worked out better for folks because they already use the communciation platform and several of them were going to be traveling internationally for fieldwork. I’m still not a fan of it because it reads like one big group text as opposed to a communication platform but everyone seems to get the messages and reply in a timely manner so I cant complain too much.

At the end of the school year, I did my annual student poll – a brief google form to guage whats working well and what needs to be improved. Surprisingly people like the move to WhatsApp. Maybe I’m the only one that wants more – who knows there’s a better world of communication out there, somewhere – I just havent found the solution.

Please leave a comment below if you have any ideas.