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Re: Collaborating on a big publication, Dropbox ftw

We met yesterday, but too much going on for any photos.

I figure that our shared Dropbox folder says most of the important stuff anyways.

We’re working towards completing our HFBC publication, which includes things like:

  • posters of inventions on crossing an imagined border wall
  • maps and 3D renderings of a cross-border portal system
  • a Canada Border Services consultancy
  • a tunnel token micro-grant
  • proposed public art projects that bring a level of symmetry to Windsor and Detroit
  • sketches of 1000 pedestrian crossings
  • transcriptions from interviews with frequent border crossers
  • new geographies
  • small-scale messaging options across international borders
  • technological imaginings for helping people otherwise unable to experience crossing a border
  • scavenger hunts / geocaching projects
  • renderings of border impediments that don’t exist, but might as well exist
  • some writing to help frame all of this

Excited to continue. Looks like next Wednesday / Friday evening are open…

How to Forget the Border Completely is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

 

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Expect More Activity + How Do You Collaborate Online?

Be it resolved that we’ll be a lot more active on here starting now.

We’ve been overly involved in communicating on Google Wave while trying to keep our brains together for Save the City. With that project winding down, we’ll be shifting more of our research and communications back on here. We’ve missed it.

And Josh said it best when he suggested that we should’ve been using the blog instead of Google Wave the entire time. He’s completely right.

Using that fancy collaborative tool that Google seemed to suggest would be the future of email never really fit into our work flow all that well, but it seemed the most convenient for having notes and research in one place. At first, maybe kidding ourselves, we thought it would do away with multiple emails back and forth, but then we kept forgetting to check our waves, so then we opted-in to receive emails when a Wave had been updated, and so it became really no better than a bunch of emails and some Google documents.

We’re always looking for ways to make this process better. We seem to lose so much in translation from discussions to the next time we meet up or begin working on something new. Should we be saving Word documents to Dropbox? I know Cristina and I have been using it to pass photos back and forth and its fairly convenient, though we haven’t tried working on the documents from there — I suppose we’re using it as a glorified FTP. Google Docs kind of works, but is somewhat annoying to have documents in two places (as I don’t think anyone is really truly committing to the cloud yet). What do you use when you’re working on something with someone else? How do you resolve multiple files with the same names?

With our goal (really this time) of trying to put together some kind of publication soon(ish), what’s going to be the best way to keep ourselves on the same page, or at the very least, merge everything together at the very end?

Any regular readers — what’s your method(s) for collaborating online? BCL, any suggestions for how we should move forward with this?