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Team solutions #1: Text development
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 22, 2011 at 06:15 AM
Most of the topics here focus on _Personal_ outlining and information management, but several of us have mentioned, on various occasions, the need for team collaboration. Indeed, in my own daily operations nowadays, sharing information and working with others on common material represents most of my work time.
Team collaboration means many things, so rather than leave this thread open to everything from wikis to project management solutions, I propose to focus on one particular aspect, which is joint textual development, e.g. for proposals, reports, scientific publications, etc. I would not exclude the quantitative components of such deliverables, though they may well deserve their own thread.
A special aspect of such textual collaboration are knowledge bases, e.g. wikis. I’m personally interested on more structured formats, e.g. like folder trees and mind maps, but others’ minds may work otherwise.
(If there is interest on other collaborative applications, e.g. for project management, I would propose to initiate separate threads.)
In the context of textual development, I seem to use many of the wonderful tools discussed here at preliminary stages, or to provide an overview of the expected outcome, whereas I must then turn to ‘universal’ formats like word processor documents to share my input and work with others on a common deliverable. The inverse also happens, e.g. if I am responsible for the final product, I will probably get everybody’s input in .doc(x) format and then combine, restructure and cross-reference it with an outliner or mindmapper (usually also used as an outliner).
With much of the work happening ‘in the middle’, i.e. after agreeing on the outline and before joining all the texts together, I wonder what solutions people here have come up with for collaborating with others on joint texts?
Jose has mentioned the use of the file system itself, allowing for everyone to work on their own document, with an outliner such as Aignes? AM-notebook to provide the overview, and several other such solutions were proposed in the relevant thread. However, would this mean also sharing the outline (overview) itself? It is mostly such solutions I’m personally interested in, i.e. allowing everyone to see both the forest and the trees.
Posted by JBfrom
Oct 22, 2011 at 07:00 AM
Re collaborative document editing and sharing:
The key for this type of need is to have something that is
1. readable, and
2. usable by everyone
The best solution I’ve found is to create a separate Wordpress blog for the project.
Pages offer hierarchical organization, while posts offer ephemeral updates. You can subscribe via RSS, and everyone can edit.
You can control the permissioning and passwords via the plugin “Password Protect Wordpress Blog” (for simple authorization needs)
A good theme for this type of blog is “Toolbox 1.3”
I also find the plugin “post type switcher” handy for when a post needs to be converted to a canonical document.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 22, 2011 at 11:08 AM
Hi, Alexander,
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but there was recently an article on the NY Times web site about using Dropbox for collaboration:
Steve Z.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 22, 2011 at 04:25 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
> I?m not sure if this is exactly what you?re looking for, but there was recently an article
>on the NY Times web site about using Dropbox for collaboration:
Steve thanks; Dropbox is already a significant step forward from using email to exchange files, and I’m grateful that with at least some of my collaborators we’ve switched to that.
However, even with Dropbox, we still work with .doc files and the rest. I was wondering what kind of information management solutions exist in order to have a better perspective of structured content.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 23, 2011 at 11:54 AM
Have you looked into OneNote, Alexander? It’s set up for direct collaboration, though I’ve never used it that way.