So a major theme at
Open Publish 2008 was "collaboration".
- Brett Jackson (in his capacity as a recently-departed employee of Atlassian) started off well, dipped into a puff-piece and then came good in the end.
- Michael Sampson talked about expertise location & some other collaboraty stuff.
- Cairo Walker talked about working with the WWF - and included some interesting facts about bees & elephants.
- James Robertson had some interesting points about collaboration - including the distinction between the internal (collaboration) & external (publishing) roles of team collaboration.
- Nerida Hart presented on the LWA work she has been doing.
I have two concerns with all this talk of collaboration:
- Keeping the focus purely on collaboration technology rather than all the other elements.
- Making it concrete & specific. Who wants to collaborate on what and why? Because not all collaboration situations are the same and what works well for a co-located team will not work for a global community of interest. "Collaboration" (like "knowledge" or "innovation") is a word that covers a multitude of sins.
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3 comments:
Matt ... I find it fascinating that you call out the two concerns you did. I thought all of the collaboration sessions were much more about the process and human factors that the technology. Except perhaps the guy who did the briefing on the Web 2.0 tools ... :-)
So ... are you outlining your concerns specifically about the Open Publish presentations on collaboration, or "collaboration" stuff in general?
M.
Michael - Much more around "collaboration" stuff in general than Open Publish presenters in particular.
And yeah that web 2.0 guy - who let him in?
Actually the more I think about it, the more the comment applies to OP08 as well. The sessions generally talked about the human & process issues as applied to the technology - and yes that included mine. Now given that OP is primarily about electronic publishing, that's to be expected.
But if you want to talk about collaboration, then you have to talk about a whole bunch of things completely outside the realm of software - such as facilitation, emotion, etc.
There was a big bunch of stuff missing - and a given the focus of OP is not fatal but it does concern me.
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