On last night’s #twchat, we talked Collaboration – both on and offline.

Given the arena, online collaboration was the real key to the conversation. We talked about how the barriers to effective collusion change online. Without a number of interpersonal cues, we need to be a bit more forgiving of our partners – especially when working with people who we’ve never met.

The key question for the interpersonal aspect of cooperative work was, is being nice enough to collaborate effectively? The general concensus was that being nice is nice – but being useful trumps niceness. Collaboration means getting things done, which requires skill or savvy. High quality interpersonal skills are great in their own way – but being able to move the work forward is better.

The second question of the night focused on tools. The big three, as Mark put them, were email, Google Wave, and Skype. The combination of call-and-response tools (as well as the mix of real-time and asynchronous tools) seems to work well. We Thoughtwrestlers use Wave a lot – it’s proven to be a very useful tool.

@kkish also mentioned writeboards, Basecamp, and social media as helpful for collaboration – which makes perfect sense.

@BranjiJBlark mentioned using conference hashtags to find useful slideshares, google docs and wikis – which seems to be a fairly well used framework for public collaboration.

Email is still the powertool for online collaboration – partly because of it’s general acceptance and ease of use.

By the end of the chat we had agreed that, for collaboration of any kind to succeed, there needs to be a sense of passion for the project from all parties. This passion can help get you past interpersonal issues – but cannot replace the skills and knowledge needed to get things done.

What would you add to the discussion? How do you collaborate?

Transcript of #twchat for July 21st, 2010 – What the Hashtag

TweepML Participants list for #twchat, July 21st – Collaboration

Image by woodleywonderworks.

Author’s Note: These are my notes from #twchat done in much the same way as I post notes from #blogchat on Sundays, and as such will be missing pieces of the conversation. I try to be thorough, but you’ve got to maintain your point of view, right? So – read the notes, and please by all means weigh in. Especially if you read the transcript appended to this post.

Tonight’s Thoughtwrestling Chat was all about bringing ideas to their fullness and giving them a sense of completion.

The night began with some thoughts about the tools we use to bring ideas to life. Tasks lists seemed to be one of the key tools most people were using – although there is of course a wide variety of ways to use tasks lists. Even with this small tool, little tricks can help us keep going; I shared a tip Marketing Sensei gave me – if you highlight the things you’ve completed, rather than striking them through, it does something different psychologically. You’re reinforcing completion, rather than negating responsibility. Positivity and achievement, even on this scale, makes a bigger difference than we expect.

The Resistance. The Lizard Brain. The major subject of Seth Godin’s book Linchpin came up – which of course can be an entire discourse on its own. We talked about how to approach the idea of the Resistance – the idea that fear of success (or, perhaps, the fear of being noticed in a negative way because of success) can flip the self-sabotage switch in many of us. I think this one may need more discussion on its own – it’s a big subject.

The last part of the chat I noticed – and there is of course more, which is why we’re providing the transcript – was a debate about sharing the burden of ideas. When an idea is new, it’s easy to get excited. However, there is the weight that we put on others when intimating our ideas. We may encourage them to buy in, to critique, to support. Is this beneficial in all cases?

What do you think? Were you on the chat? Have we missed anything? What else can we talk about, to help each other bring our ideas toward completion?

Transcript: What the Hashtag – Transcript for #twchat, July 7th 2010

Participants’ list: TweepML #twchat July 7th 2010

Learn more about #twchat on our Community page!