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January 27, 2006
Collaboration?
After reading Jeremy's last entry, and his query to the general public, I had a query of my own (and if I'm spoiling one of the future parts of your series, Jeremy, I apologize).
How do you want to collaborate?
A lot of people have their own ideas as to how this should happen, but I think it would be interesting to get the general public's idea of what "collaboration" should look like.
Is it some kind of filesharing mechanism? Instant messaging? something else?
Posted by sdh7 at January 27, 2006 02:34 PM
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Different communication technologies work best for different things. For general "project management" type communication, especially with lots of people, Basecamp (http://37signals.com) is excellent. For general communication between two or three people, email is great. When email isn't fast enough, the telephone or IM (Jabber or AIM) are good. For collaborative writing or documentation, a wiki, Writeboard (37signals again), or SubEthaEdit (Mac-only, http://codingmonkeys.de) might be suited to the task.
Posted by: Andrew Witte at January 27, 2006 04:30 PM
Email (mailing list) and IM for discussion.
The "fruits" of discussion become wiki pages. Edits to the wiki pages are also effects from the email/im discussions.
Wikis are good at storing basic content, but there will always be other documents -- Word docs, Presentations, PDFs, diagrams, pictures, etc. -- so a network file store read/write to the group would be nice.
Blog to have group announcements and such and coordination of activities.
That pretty much covers it.
Obviously, we have an email server and a nice mailing list manager. We don't have an IM server, but I don't think that that is that big of a deal (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google, random Jabber server are all available for folks to leverage). We have a wiki, but it's the Encyclopedic type of wiki. Per-group/per-project wikis would fit better in this scenario.
We don't have any network storage.
But notice where it all starts. With a mailing list. Group management via Sympa. Leverage Sympa groups to manage access controls to wikis, blogs, network stores. *gasp*
And yes, this all definitely hints at my 3 items.
Posted by: jms18 at January 27, 2006 04:31 PM
(37signals is awesome, by the way)
Posted by: jms18 at January 27, 2006 04:32 PM
We don't have any network storage.
http://filer.case.edu is probably adequate for many people's needs. Or people can turn on file sharing on their own machine.
Posted by: Andrew Witte at January 27, 2006 05:33 PM
By "We"," I meant ITS.
Posted by: jms18 at January 27, 2006 06:14 PM
Maybe I'm just playing with semantics here but when I hear "How do you want to collaborate?" the first thing that comes to mind is not any sort of technology but the good old fashioned method of "sit down and talk to people".
This was the first form of collaboration and still the most powerful. If I go to lunch with Jeremy and Lev and talk about work we are doing and what we have in common, that has an impact that no form of IM, email, or wiki will ever have.
I aplogize if I misunderstand the question but if you're asking me, that is how I would answer the question "How do you want to collaborate?"
Posted by: Aaron Shaffer at January 27, 2006 07:41 PM
I agree that communication in person is, in lots of cases (but not always), the best way to get things done. However, because of the reference to Jeremy's previous post, I read the question as "what technologies do you want to use to facilitate collaboration?"
Posted by: Andrew Witte at January 27, 2006 10:31 PM