I've had a mess of such experiences. The one that comes closest to mind is the creation of a web-based calendar for our institution. I teach at a medical college with ~500 students. Our faculty is largely adjunct, and even full-time faculty are distributed geographically & temporally between clinic and classroom locations, and have difficulty coming together for face-to-face meetings. We joke about Mercury being in permanent retrograde in our school's birthchart - communication is a constantly broken issue. One difficulty we've faced, is the lack of a central institutional calendar, easily accessible to all, capable of catching scheduling conflicts, and available from remote locations. As the resident edugeek, I was charged with creating a web-based calendar, and muckled together an installation of WebCalendar - technically a great application. We placed portals on the school's website and learning management system, handed administration to the school's receptionist, and ... basically no one used it. Changes in meeting times/dates were often not updated, many items were never placed on it, serious conflicts between overlapping events continued to occur. Even after 3 years, folks still express surprise on being told/reminded that this even exists. We still largely rely on a collection of individual calendars residing in various offices, often in significant conflict with one another.

In contrast, another tool - phpSurveyor (now LimeSurvey) - introduced at about the same time - has been received very successfully. I set up an installation of this to be used for voting on faculty senate issues. Our official quorum was previously 10%, as out of 90+ full-time and adjunct faculty, we were fortunate when we could manage to get 10 in a room together at one time for a face-to-face meeting. With online voting, we were able to easily boost participation to 35-50% of faculty.

I think the difference, is that this latter has a focus around specific prescribed tasks. It involves not merely the introduction of a tool, but introduces a focus for activity, a specific invitation for participation. The calendar has been more of a "build it & they will come" project - perhaps not a realistic expectation. Complaints about our prevailing system are common, but we don't seem to be able to come together with a collective vision to drive a solution.

Kindof like a hammer. A great tool, but houses don't seem to get built when you merely lay them around the place.

Will Taylor
http://wt.similibus.org