Collaboration - Help or Hindrance?

Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.

- Vesta M. Kelly

Are you an optimist like Vesta M. Kelly, or are you more of a pessimist like the people at despair.com? I suppose your point of view really depends on your experiences with collaboration. But let's face it, in this day and age, we really do have to learn to work together to get things done.

Have you ever heard of something called writeboard? It's a web-based application that lets you invite people to collaborate on a document with you. You give them a link and a password and they can all log in and work on the document. The nice thing is that writeboard saves all previous versions of the document, so you can go back to any previous iteration if you don't like some of the recent changes that were made. And each contributor can write a comment on what he or she added, so you can stay on top of the modifications. It's a really cool idea, and the designers have made it easy to use. That being said, however, I can't imagine writing documents of any length or working over an extended period of time - the versions and comments might get overwhelming.

I was recently invited to collaborate on a short document using writeboard. There was a very basic outline provided by the person initiating the collaboration, and our team was asked to fill in the outline. Writeboard made it easy to add information to the document, but even then, collaboration was a little tricky. For example, someone had previously added a bullet to a list, and I wasn't sure what that bullet meant. But I didn't know if I should delete it or leave it. I ended up leaving it there with a comment that I didn't know what they meant by it. That person didn't respond, so a later collaborator ended up deleting that bullet item. These are the kinds of problems you might encounter in small-scale collaboration.

If you're a professional communicator, you should check out co-ment. It's another web-based application, but this one is for text annotation, not text creation/revision. I think co-ment would be really useful for distributing a document to a selection of reviewers. That way you could have all of their comments in one place instead of spread out over several copies of your document. Co-ment would make it much easier to incorporate reviewer comments into your document.

So why collaborate on a document at all? As Tom Clancy said, "Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act." As a famous author, he had the luxury of working alone and on his own schedule. But for the rest of us communication professionals, we often find ourselves in a situation of having to collaborate at one level or another on documents.

Collaborating on documents can be tricky. People have different writing styles and different ideas of how information should be presented. So the first rule of collaboration has to be creating well-defined tasks for the individuals in the group. And in general it's much more effective to have each person responsible for a complete deliverable, not portions of a deliverable. In other words, it's awfully hard to get people to write sections of a a single chapter, but asking each person to submit a chapter in a book is actually done a lot. That way the person gets closure - they get to write the introduction, the body of the document, and the summary. The collaboration will come in making sure your chapter fits with everyone else's, and reviewing all the chapters to make sure the document makes sense overall.

Another benefit to having well-defined tasks is evaluation. The project leader, the manager, the professor - whoever has to evaluate the completed work has to know which parts were submitted by whom. Otherwise there's no accountability. Similarly, the team needs to know that everyone is carrying their own weight and no one is slacking off or taking credit for something they didn't do. The situation reminds me of a rookie quarterback who shall remain nameless: when his team wins, he takes a lot of the credit, but when they lose, it's the team's fault.

So why bother at all? Because collaboration can actually produce a much more complete document. Everyone has specialized knowledge these days, and by collaborating, you can make sure you cover all the bases. If one person overlooks or omits something, someone else on the team is likely to include that information or make it clearer or better.

Okay, so I've given my views on collaborating on documents. What about other types of collaboration, like sharing ideas in forums? To be honest, I see only positive results from that type of collaboration. Sharing knowledge and ideas is a great way to expand your horizons, to learn new things, to gain new insights... I have been involved in a lot of discussion forums about all kinds of communication topics, especially while a student at NJIT. I am amazed at how much I still don't know and how on top of things my classmates are. Reading their opinions makes me go back and reevaluate my own opinions on things. Forums are a really great way to share information.

What about chat rooms? I've had mixed experiences with that. One problem is that, because chat rooms are synchronous, I have to be available (and remember to go sit at the computer) at the scheduled time, and that is often a problem for me. And sometimes chat rooms can turn into social sessions instead of collaboration meetings. But when you have a chat moderator or someone who is tasked with keeping the group focused, a chat room can be really helpful, especially if there are things you don't understand, because you can keep asking more and more specific questions until you eventually drill down to your area of confusion.

The main downside to chat rooms is that if you get too many people involved, the meeting can become a mess of people "chatting" over each other. We used chat in my Corporate Communication course when my four-person advertising group had to meet, and it worked out really well. But when we invited the other group and ended up with eight people in the chat room, we got very little accomplished.

In my course on the Elements of Visual Design, we had some opportunities to work collaboratively with other students, but there were a few reasons I shied away from that. First, I wasn't exactly sure how the evaluation part of the collaborative effort would work out. For example, if I created a blog and the other person created a website, wouldn't the website be a lot more work? Would I therefore get a lower grade because my effort would be less? (Now that I'm almost done, though, I don't think that would have been the case - it's all a lot of work!) Also, I only really knew one other person in the class with whom I would consider collaborating, but she had already chosen to develop the same type of social media (blog) as I had chosen... And as a student, I was concerned not knowing my other classmates very well that there might be conflict either in aspects of design or timeliness of deliverables, and so I chose to go it on my own. I might still "collaborate" somewhat by providing links from my blog to another student's work, but that's collaboration on my terms, which isn't really collaboration at all, I guess...