Collaboration - What Worked, What Didn't

I have been working on an interesting proposal project, which is due out soon. It's a proposal for Web 2.0 marketing services, and I am presenting it on a website. I have developed it online, partly with the help of a colleague.  We are part of a larger group engaged in a common endeavor, and it's been interesting to see how the various forms of communication have been useful - or not.
Most of the communications were asynchronous, and most were text-based. One synchronous application we tried was online chat sessions. While it was interesting to see people's comments come up, it was hard to keep track of who said what to whom, and after an hour, I felt l could've said it all in 15 minutes on a conference call. Those sessions were not very productive, but it did start a collaboration between one colleague and I that lasted the entire project.

The need to get our respective website projects rolling drove two of us to start collaborating. That relationship started on email following the chat sessions. I think I started it. That led to asynchronous thoughts passing between us, with some attachments to boot. Email served a useful but utilitarian purpose, and was best for attaching files. But it was still slow, as each of us was online perhaps once or twice per day.


Emails became limiting when it came to sharing URLs. "Now where was that email about Twitter metrics?" Surf around the Inbox for a few minutes, perhaps I'd find it, perhaps not. To avoid the pain of sorting through the email, we turned to delicious to pass bookmarks back and forth. That application worked as desired, no more, no less. Finding bookmarks was easy this way, which was important for reference info for our project.

We also used our respective websites to collaborate, sort of. We would each develop our site and direct the other to it for a look-see and feedback. A picture may be work many words, and the reassurance that I was on the right track was valuable, but it wasn't necessarily productive. That doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile, it just didn't produce anything.

At one point, several of us were trying out a different technology, Writeboard, in order to collaborate on an unrelated matter. In that venue, a third person mentioned that they were interested in podcasting for their project. I like podcasting and thought I could be helpful, so I made a 30-second pitch using Audacity that essentially said, "If you write the script, I'll do the podcast." My idea got a warm reception, but I never did receive a script, so the podcast never materialized.

Time management pressures governed all this work, and it seemed (and still seems) like I took on more than I bargained for. Desperate times called for desperate measures - I picked up the phone. Wow, that's when things started happening. Just hearing someone's voice on the other end who seemed to be scratching their head as hard as I made me feel better, and with each of us having computers in front of us while we talked, we were able to provide responsive information to each other in real-time. While we couldn't interact on the screen, it was collaboration none the less. In the end, we provided each with references that we used in building our projects, and bartered services in trade. I did the layout for branded documents, while my colleague provided a logo.

So my proposal is almost done but for the proofreading, due partly from a moderate productivity boost from our efforts. We used different technologies for different purposes, but in the end, I found I enjoyed the human touch - hearing another persons voice - the best.

Red Phone Booth:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/craig-sinclair/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.

Relief Photo: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/seriykotik/ / CC BY-NC 2.0