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.
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One thing that we discussed in this #twchat is ways to try to get anonymous input into idea generation and brainstorming practices. I’d like to try some experiments along these lines to see if it generates better ideas.
Who’s interested?
[...] Notes from #twchat – Collaboration Jam! | Thoughtwrestling Ian Rountree recaps a Twitter-moderated conversation on creative collaboration. Part one discussed the attitudes and behavior required for collaboration (is being nice enough?) and part two covered tools. [...]