May 21, 2001 New Thinking:
Creating content collaboratively

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• Replicability: Digital content is easy, cheap and fast to copy.
• Common medium: The Internet is a common medium that allows for fast, cheap and ongoing communication.
• Common tools: Authors have the same or similar software tools (word processing, email, etc.)
• Changeability: Digital documents are easy to change, add notes to, etc.
• Compactness: Digital documents, particularly text-based ones, are relatively small in size and can therefore be moved quickly and efficiently between authors.
• Hypertext: Hypertext is affecting the way we write content. Documents are getting shorter and more interlinked. This invites collaboration.
• Information overload: Not only is the amount of content exploding, the information contained in content is changing with increasing frequency. Collaboration allows people to pool resources and keep up with rapidly changing trends.

Collaborative writing works best where:

• There is a major content creation task at hand that demands the input of multiple disciplines.
• The content job can be broken up into clearly defined segments that can be allocated to individual authors. However, just allocating pieces of work to people is not collaboration. Unless there is strong interaction between authors, and an overall sense of direction and style is jointly established, you will not achieve the true potential of collaboration.
• There is a well thought-through set of processes to facilitate collaboration.

Collaboration is not easy because the classical business environment rewards individual effort. A great many people believe the motto that ‘knowledge is power’. It can also be the case that the better the writer the bigger the ego.

Add to this the fact that a lot of people who can easily accept criticism in other areas become very tetchy when their writing is criticized. To top it all off, while obvious mistakes can be pointed out and accepted, two people may have very different but perfectly acceptable styles. Writing is an inexact science – more like a craft really – and there is rarely one right way to write up a piece of content.

People will collaborate better if:

• They know each other and have a respect for the skills and knowledge each party brings.
• There is a clear reward and remuneration structure that supports collaborative writing.
• Management shows a strong commitment to collaboratively created content, and is actively willing to promote such an approach.
• There is a similarity of style and thinking between the authors, or different parties bring very different skills. For example, one person has a deep technical understanding but relatively poor writing skills, whereas another has excellent writing skills.
• There is a shared understanding of what needs to be achieved and the processes involved in getting to the finished product.
• There is an equal level of commitment and enthusiasm.

Gerry McGovern

 

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