I am officially flashed!
In the spirit of social collaboration, I asked my network to review, extend, criticize and challenge my draft for an article. Before I will consolidate the great input to one fluent document I would like to say a big THANKYOU to all the thoughts and work, which the contributors shared.

https://haraldschirmer.titanpad.com/3 (Service leider nicht mehr verfügbar)
By the way I am really questioning myself, if my consolidation is the best way to value the great input, or if going back to a single author article is not a fall-back?
I want to share my learnings of former, similar experiments and my experience of this public one – after showing you the hero’s of my network: (and believe me – group editing of a long text is not just fun“)
It is not very common, to write an article with multiple authors (22). Here are some lessons I learned so far:

There are various types of contributions within the collaborative document to expect:
- spelling and grammar (English is not my native language 😉
- smaller additions, fragments
- bigger parts, new sentences even complete blocks
- questions which enrich the text (and could remain)
- questions to the author or the others (asking for opinion, permission…)
- comments (to be published or to give additional hints)
- discussions (I agree with…)
- appreciation or expressing agreement or denial
- short thought journeys (could be this, or maybe that…)
- links to valuable sources
- advice to do things different
There are additional sources to keep an eye on:
- I received eMails with additional information, thoughts and feedback
- We had parallel discussions on Facebook and various Messengers
- We shared experience on video-calls and via phone
ensure enough time for the network – my first invitation was for 1 week, the reminder was sent 2 days before end (weekend is not a good idea – family time!)
as in all collaborative projects, expect the most activity right after publishing and at or even after the deadline 😉
Diversity means not only a variety of thoughts and input:
- There are different expectations on a „good“ storyline (visionary, strategy, pragmatic, philosophic, general, specific)
- Same is for the writing style (scientific, personal, generic, advising, reviewing, promoting, explaining…)
What’s the goal of the collaborative article?
- Creating a multi-perspective knowledge consolidation
- Displaying the collaborative work style
- Offering a complex but rich reading experience (which might be hard to read)
- Strengthening networks, promoting experts, demonstrating „it works“ or just showing off
Don’t just delegate work – the list part in my article had the option to be enriched with links and explanations
Expect promotion of own content, websites, articles, products, services (it did not really happen here and it is not always bad)
Etherpad is not helpful for bigger groups (see some screenshots at the end) – next time I try Google Docs
- coloring is very limited – more than 5 contributors are hard to distinguish
- I have no idea to find out who wrote what (if I could change the colors of the authors would help a lot, or a mouse over, who is behind the color, once you scroll down)
- The authors are only visible in the time slider mode, which takes forever to load
- the sidebar did not work at all – chatting was never used, since there was no indication of anyone being „online“

stay tuned for the article…
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