Online Collaboration.

I spent a little while looking into online collaboration the other day because I was intrigued with an online musician-type who put out a call to other musicians for backup vocals. As part of my travels I decided to give google docs a look. After playing with it a while, I mentioned it to my teenage son, and he told me that some kids at school use it regularly to codify attributes of fellow students, and in the context you would expect of high school students — or these days, middle school students.

Naturally, I don’t have access to this document, so I’ve created a fictional interpretation of it at left for you. It’s important to have raw data before constructing the decision tree. I have to say, I found some humor in imagining the talented and committed souls who built google docs learning of this ultimate use.

The musician call-out is interesting since it doesn’t seem to actually involve an online tool other than a remixer site through which to share files. The editing and assembly is apparently done elsewhere. Next I’m off to look for online audio editing and mixing tools. If you know of any, please point me in the right direction.

I realize collaboration is one thing and decision-by-committee is another, but generally, it’s hard to dismiss the benefits of online collaboration if it’s easy to use, stable and secure. That’s why the Ad Giants ONE system is integrated with WebEx, not to mention a critical approval function — because no matter how big the team effort, the buck has to stop somewhere.

[tags] collaboration, ad_giants, ONE_system, google_docs [/tags]