"Sandbox" not a winning term for corporate culturesI'd like to agree heartily that "you sometimes forget that not everyone is a blogger or uses wikis for collaborative work and learning." My own bias is that early adopters and pioneers like to talk and hang out with one another, forgetting that at least two-thirds of people are within one standard deviation of the mean. The gap only widens when the early adopters / advocates get paid for being out where the buses don't run.
I would also suggest that in the mostly corporate and government projects I've worked on, you wouldn't get far with decision-makers by calling something a sandbox when you meant an always-available tool for practice and skill-building.
(I know that's not what was meant, but I think this point is worth stating directly, and it gives me a springboard for the rest of this comment.)
Many of my own projects have involved helping people work with complex computer applications (the Amtrak reservation system, the employer's customer sales-force-automation system, a financial service company's system sold to retail banks). Almost always it's an intense struggle to get the organization to see the value in creating a robust, realistic test system. By this I mean a structured sandbox, I suppose -- a way for newly-trained people (or people learning on their own) to apply what they're learning in a realistic way while minimizing the consequences of error.
At Amtrak, we identified the different types of trains that travelers might use: long-distance trains with sleeping accommodations, short-to-mid-distance unreserved trains, reservation-only high-speed trains like the Metroliners. We got the cooperation of both the marketing department (which controlled the reservation system) and the train operations department (which created and programmed trains in the system) to clone ten or twelve actual trains. These followed the schedules and routes of existing trains; the only difference was that the 'training trains' had unique, four-digit numbers.
The training trains pulled fare information from the actual fare database, so we didn't have to do anything to keep that information fresh. We created training-train logon numbers; you used one of these to make reservations on the training trains. This prevented people from creating a reservation for an actual passenger on an imaginary train.
(Sorry for the detail; I just wanted to show the thinking that went into this feature.)
All too often, I think, inadequate development schedules and lack of resources are rationalized as "Internet speed" when in fact they're shortsightedness. It's hard to build a business case for letting people work with the system in their own way, especially when some executives see individualized distance learning as something that happens off the clock.
-- Dave