Thoughts on Collaboration

The Internet is an amazing tool for information procurement, and increasingly more of our culture and knowledge is delivered using Internet technologies: this is pretty easy to grasp. Knowing this, it's startling to think that the Internet as information delivery technology is largely overshadowed by the Internet as a technology that facilitates collaboration.

We're used to technologies like the printing press, radio, television, the telephone, the xerox machine, etc. vastly expanding the facilitation of dissemination and spread of information and knowledge, so it's easiest to think of the Internet in these terms. At the same time what makes the Internet so powerful is that it bridges the distance between people and provides technologies that in making it easier to share information, groups of people are able to create information on the Internet.

Open Source and Free Software is a result of this collaboration, for example, but the Internet is full of examples of communities coming together to produce information and resources that are bigger than any one person could create on their own: social networking sites (ravelry.com, facebook, nings) blogging communities (eg. livejournal, wordpress.com) wiki-projects (eg. wikipedia, flossmanuals c2-wiki.) In truth the technologies of the Internet that mediate these projects are relatively simple. For example:

• Mailing Lists

  Discussion lists are ancient in the land of the internet, but many communities function very well with just a mailing list. We are often overwhelmed by email, but there are many features which recommend email over newer tools like blogging. Primarily, email is "pushed" to your members'. Since we generally presume that people check their email, getting information in email requires less intention than getting information via blog or wiki, while audience can remain stable for longer.

• Wikis

  Wikis are a great tool for collaborating on a text which is uniquely digital, uniquely hypertext. While encylcopedists have adopted it to great effect, the form is flexible, discursive, and highly interactive. As a result it can be--with proper guidance--a great tool for collaborative projects, but unguided they often are too flexible and underutilized as a result.

• Blogs

  The blog is perhaps the easiest technology to use, and use well. We're familar with the form if not from other blogs, but from columns and analog journals. The biggest challenges are keeping blog posts indexed and useful for more than a few weeks, and learning to blog as a habit. Blogs make a great experimental space for playing with new ideas, in addition to recording personal perspectives and historical contexts.

• Messaging

  Before instant messaging, IRC (internet rely chat) provides group chat experiences that allows collaborators to "talk" things over in real time, in groups, both as a primary form of communication and as a "back-channel" for distributing links and other information in other forms of real time conversations. Often, however, such messaging can be distracting, and hard to follow for the uninitiated. Furthermore there are some kinds of projects for which sporadic telephone calls are more productive.

• Social Networking

  While "work" in the conventional sense isn't often accomplished on social networking sites, they do foster community and communication, and contemporary functionality includes a "feed" of information that can automatically keep your team in touch with their collective activities.

• Version Control

  Programmers use version control systems (subversion, git, etc.) to allow a group of people to work on one project concurrently, to store chronological iterations of their projects so that they can return to "known working states" if an train of thought leads to a dead end. The technology is quite simple, but remarkably powerful in the creation of shared works, while still allowing and respecting individual contributions. Software engineers use these tools to great effect, but I'd argue that additional kinds of creators and creative teams should use version control and similar tools.

This isn't to say that all collaborative tools are perfect and we don't need new and more inventive tool to facilitate collaborative work. I've touched on some of the more specific challenges, but collaboration on the Internet--as a whole--face one major challenge: one of expectation.

When we understand how simple technologies are, when we see the great accomplishments of Internet technologies it's all to easy to say "well wouldn't it be great if I did that," or "you know, why [my project] really needs is some good collaborative technology." It turns out, not surprisingly, that harnessing the power of collaborative technology this is much more difficult than simply flipping a few bits on a piece of software and then waiting for emergent phenomena to develop.

This challenge, how to facilitate and shepperd a nascent community--even when that community is all located in one place--can take many different forms. While the specifics of these challenges form the basis of much of our work here, and are highly dependent on the goals, resources, and contexts of individual projects there are some general themes:

• Communities need editors and moderators to provide leadership and ensure quality.

• Raw information is rarely useful without curated guides and views onto the data.

• Communities need the flexibility to have wide reaching discussions and sometimes stray from topic, in order to develop unique identities.

• Beyond an initial set of necessary tools, community needs should dictate the development of technology, and often fewer tools and platforms are better than more tools and platforms.