Best practices

This page lists a couple of "Best practices": Recommendations for optimal usage of Cyans.

Your thoughts, enhancements, suggestions and any other feedback on these are very much appreciated!

Async collaboration

Don't wait for another participant to reply. Format your comments in a way that encourages asynchronous collaboration. You can trust that your message will be seen by all other topic participants, just not necessarily right now.
Does a topic requires synchronous communication? Then schedule a call, meeting or chat session (asynchronously, using Cyans). Be sure to update the topic with any decisions made, to update other and future Topic participants.
Try to avoid addressing individual participants by name. Instead, write your questions in a way that anyone with the required information can reply to you. This may not always be the person you had in mind, and it simplifies looping in others to get the best response to your question.

Try to add complete and coherent comments. Avoid sending multiple comments in a row.
Write with your future-self and future-collegues in mind: any comment you write should be written as a coherent piece of documentation. The better you write, the more value you create in the long term.
Stay "on-topic". If your comment is (slightly) unrelated to the current topic, simply open up a new topic.
If you notice other participants going off-topic, simply start a new topic by quoting their comment. Link to the new topic from the (derailed) topic so it can continue on it's original topic.

Add new participants to running topics, instead of starting new Topics. This gives the new participant the full context of the existing topic.
Avoid adding too many participants early in an exploratory discussion. You can always add them later, when the situation is clearer.

After discussing a topic that could impact other disciplines, loop in the appropriate participants at the end so they can see what has been discussed / decided / discovered / etc.
Loop in your documentation team / technical writers to ensure discussed issues get properly added to the appropriate user-manuals, procedures, etc.
Loop in your QA and style maintenance writers after debating a style issue
Loop in stake-holders after discussing task requirements to keep them up to date