This is a wonderful article from the founder of Google Docs. He makes a distinction between the document and the collaboration.
As I reflect on this, I think we all take on the role of participant and project hero and fight the tension between document and collaboration. For me, Tinderbox is the one tool that helps me coordinate all the various elements of cooperation (even with myself) and document development. As we discussed in yesterday’s meetup, I’ve also found super effective ways to collaborate with others with Tinderbox.
I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this article.
I don’t understand why “document” and “collaboration” need to be in the same box. I’ve “collaborated” on hundreds of projects involving thousands of documents, with co-workers over the past many decades. I can count on zero fingers the number of times anyone I’ve worked with used Google Docs for collaboration. (Among other things, the app being subject to considerable suspicion in the corporate and federal contexts where my work took place.)
“Collaboration”, a trendy millennial term with nothing but fuzzy definition, in practice always involves dozens to hundreds of documents in the works at a time, and a large variety of team configurations depending on the tasks at hand, and upon those tasks’ related documents. There’s no science at all to this – one learns by experience how to have a project, how to form and work within a team, how to accomplish its goals, and how to adapt what one learns for new contexts.
(Of course, I never worked in any corporate or government context where anyone used – of even knew about – Tinderbox. I always used it for my private notes, but never to finish any official work product.)