Originally published here.
James Michie created a Google doc and assigned a few persons in it. The first issue was clearly: how the hell was I supposed to cooperate/cowork/collaborate co… whatever when I didn’t even know any of the participants?
How would you, anonymous reader of this temporary blog, do it?
Have you ever organized a meeting with your friends (going to a concert, a festival, any gathering for that matter) in some remote place none of you knew? I have, more than once : Let’s meet by the church, by the cityhall, … was usually the way to would solve the getting together issue.
No friends (yet!) here, hardly any possibility to contact them then – besides email but those guys might not use email all that much / Twitter could have been another option but … in my humble opinion it is a poor way of communicating plus why polluting my followers’ TL with anything that might be of very remote interest to them ? – remains : the place = the Google doc.
So I started to check in regularly. Then I left a couple of comments, as a trace, as much to better understand how things were meant to be done as to let know that one of the participants, me, had been there.
Long story short: Nothing of substance really came out until Friday actually, when Emma came up with the idea of a questionnaire. The rest is a question of lighting the fire and keeping it burning: I relayed the questionnaire to all my followers, using Twitter, Facebook, Scoopit, Linkedin even.
Was I effective as collaborator? My first reaction would be: why don’t you ask the others? Honestly, I think I was more instrumental in kick starting the whole thing than in the writing up of the paper itself. My first conclusion, based upon a small number of votes, still holds true though.
Want to know the best way to cook an egg? Scrambled … or Soft boiled. There’s no doubt as to why people voted for a type of cooking it or another: the taste.
The week started slow, I must admit I was a bit worried how it would end. I am less now although remains to be seen whether it’ll continue like that of if, as I’d rather, we will manage to build a team anyone of us will be able to trust in weeks to come.
