Conference announcement: Collaboration on Google Groups

[Watt]

Hi fellow forum users!

I'm interested in methods of collaborating on 'projects' here on Google Groups and I'd like to ask for your help in organising a virtual 'Conference' here on the forum to look into it.

Here is the process I have in mind, it will take a month to complete but, if I get some responses, my objective is to produce and publish a 'Conference Report' on group collaboration here, outlining methods, mechanisms and tools that can be used to facilitate collaboration and cooperation within this Google Group. I aim to publish it here by the last week of October.

This is my own experiment - not affiliated with TW or GG or anything else, just an attempt to have some fun and explore what can be done using just a forum. I appreciate that it may appear presumptious, and that's one example of what I'm interested in, so don't hesitate to talk about the psychology of collaboration if that interests you as well as the practical mechanics.

The Process
Stage 1: Time allowance, 1 week. Submissions open today Wednesday 25th September - Submissions close Wednesday 2nd October 2019.

Request forum users to think about collaboration and team cooperation on Google Groups and to formulate and post as many of their own questions/thoughts on the subject as they care to, here, in this thread.

I do NOT want you to discuss anybody else's contributions at this stage. I'm just looking for your own individual thoughts on collaboration on GG, crystalised as questions if possible. There are no right or wrong answers and multiple posts are welcome.

I do NOT want you to suggest external software solutions or wikis. I'm only interested in collaboration within GG at the moment.

I DO want you to think creatively about collaboration methods and problems you've experienced or solved, or collaboration problems and solutions you can see a need for but which didn't get solved. Try to think within the limitations of this forum. There are external solutions I know, but how could the same results be achieved using only Google Groups? What obstacles need to be overcome for collaboration to work here?

\define Collaboration()

"Collaboration is the process of two or more people or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration

\end

\define Google Groups ()

Google Groups is a chronologically organised, discussion based message-board forum with a search facility. It has been used by Tiddlywiki as its central discussion forum for over 14 years, since June 2005. It contains over $missingvar posts and has 6810 members. The group's all time most active poster is founder Jeremy Ruston with over 5646 posts.

\end

Stage 2: Time allowance 1 week. Submissions open Thursday 3rd October - Submissions Close Wednesday 9th October.

Generate and publish a Survey questionnaire using questions from stage 1 and post it here on the forum for completion by users. Again, no discussion at this stage.

Stage 3: Time allowance 1 week. Submissions open Friday 11th October - Submissions close Friday 18th October.
Collate, condense and tally Survey results and produce and publish a Conference Agenda and an Invitation to Attend and Discuss in a new thread here on this forum. Basically I hope to publish an Agenda and invite immediate discussion and feedback. This is when the discussion will take place. I might try and use this - Nominal Group Technique - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_group_technique but it depends on the responses.

Stage 4: Time allowance 1 week. Publication Friday 25th October.

Produce and publish here on the forum a Conference Report outlining methods, mechanisms and tools that can be used to facilitate collaboration and cooperation within this Google Group. That's it.

Well, I hope you'll take part - if nothing happens at least we'll know this approach isn't very popular, but I'm hoping we'll get some useful low-tech collaboration tools out of the 'Conference' which will be available to forum users in the future.

We're now at Stage 1, open for submissions until 2nd October - I'll bump this thread up the list until then if it looks like it's disappearing down the memory hole.
Please post below, thanks for your time and collaboration!

[Thomas Elmiger]

Hi Watt, thanks for the initiative, I think it's worth a try! So let me start.

Problem: Limitations on mobile. Posting to GG from the phone is not as powerful and fun as from the laptop. This is true for writing, formatting as well as for copy-pasting solutions/suggestions. (This ist a GG problem as well as a problem of mobile devices.)

Solutions:

a) Deal with limitations, keep the answer short, explain that you are answering from a mobile device.

b) Answer later, when a bigger screen is available.

[Watt]

Thanks for the response Thomas, you've got the ball rolling! Keep them coming, anything and everything to do with collaboration on Google Groups welcome.

[Watt]

Rather than just 'bump' this I thought it would be more productive to look through previous threads for collaboration questions and ideas.

I'm still trying to avoid discussion of the ideas just yet, hoping to collect more responses and ideas first, so please do chip in any ideas, problems, questions you can think of on the subject of collaboration here on google groups.

This recent thread response from Mat raises just the sort of questions I'm interested in;

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/TiddlyWiki/XNqCTk4JYCA

"Zachary wrote: Is anyone interested in a TiddlyWiki community book?"

Mat replied;

"2) For this project to not be a pipe dream, is someone taking the lead on this? How is it implemented? Hosted? How are people to contribute? ......How does the project survival not rely on one guy keeping up his interest for it? Or is the intention a one-off that will be outdated in a year?

3) If an author named B agrees with an article written by author A, then B can add his name to it to give further trustworthiness to A's article. Articles should probably have a stamp/tag showing the TW version it was written in, for context. The comments plugin would prolly be useful in a project like this... (but how are people to comment?)"

Generic collaboration questions this post suggests to me;

How to request collaboration on a project?

How to establish a project Lead?

How to implement collaboration?

How to join in and contribute?

How to maintain a collaborative project?

How to assign 'authority' or 'agency' to the project's authors?

How to establish version control?

What comment mechanism best suits collaboration?

Exactly the kinds of questions that could be discussed in the forthcoming 'Google Groups Collaboration Conference' . If you have any more to add please feel free to post them here.

[Cd.K]

 Hi Watt,

I honestly don't think that GG is suitable for the efficient organization of collaboration. Take a look at the website of this open source, tightly organized and successfull community: Blender. Register there (get involved) and find out which tools tools they have implemented for it. Then you can check what of it can be covered  with GG.

With GG you have far too much effort to circumvent the shortcomings for these purposes and you are distracted from the actual collaboration. 

It already starts with the fact that the post editor is no good (no storage of drafts, no version history, cumbersome insertion of pictures ...), you can't search sensibly (see here: Searching for content in Google Groups, not topics?) , no possibility to maintain a curated table of contents, ...
 

Regards

Cd.K

[Watt]

Thanks for the response Cd.K, I'll definitely have a look at Blender and add points here if I can. Thanks for the input.

I'm still collecting any thoughts on collaboration successes, failures and all points in between, as experienced by users here on google groups. Everything counts so please do post if you have any opinions, positive, negative or indifferent before we get into the discussion stage. Thanks.

[TonyM]

Watt

Thanks for this initiative which I support whole heartedly. Before any alternative is discussed we should try and leverage our existing tools.

I think the best way to proceed is to use the metaphore of a conference. Many here will I imagin be familiar. I suggest time frames and calendar bookings. Submissions and a published set of topics and streams, threads should have a conference prefix eg twconfOct2019 and topics and streams the same plus a title.

Opening a thread to allow stream and topic submissions but have a few people choose or curate rather than voting because there is no good mechanisium.

We could encorage people participating in a topic or stream to publish a summary "paper" in fresh threads same prefix, from all topic discussions. Close the conference threads with a link to the "paper"

and more

Regards
Tony

[Watt]

Thanks for the response Tony,

Have a look at the original post and you'll see the 4 stage, timetabled 'plan', such as it is, culminating in a virtual 'Conference on Collaboration in Google Groups'. I'm hoping that description will contain enough keywords to make it findable in the future.

This is still 'Stage 1 - collecting ideas' which, as you can see, closes for submissions on Wednesday 2nd October.

I'm trying to avoid discussion at this 'idea collection' stage but I've picked out these 2 points from your post and will add them to the pool for 'Stage 2';

"Before any alternative is discussed we should try and leverage our existing tools"

and

'there is no good [voting] mechanism' here on Google Groups.

Thanks for the input.

All thoughts on the problems of collaboration and possible solutions within the limitations of GG welcome, so keep them coming! Only 2 days left for submissions.

[TonyM]

Watt,

I appreciate what you are doing and wish to comply.

An Important point I am trying to make is use more than one thread and have all related threads include a tittle prefix

[twconfOct2019] Security Stream

A Single stream will in my view be a disaster. This is only about collaboration within GG which I understood is what Stage 1 is.

Are those the ideas you were collecting? Or do you want topics of discussion because none have yet being submitted.

Regards

Tony

[Watt]

Thanks Tony, you've given me an excuse to go over the original post again. Here's 'the plan';

Stage 1 - (this thread) - Submissions close Wednesday 2nd October.
Collect ideas, thoughts, problems, experiences, anything to do with collaboration on google groups. No discussion at stage 1.

Stage 2 - (new thread) - Submissions close Wednesday 9th October.
Collate responses in the form of a survey questionnaire - invite completion but no discussion at stage 2.

Stage 3 - (new thread) - Friday 18th October.
Based on 1 and 2 publish a 'Conference Agenda' and invite 'attendence' and discussion!

Stage 4 - (new thread) - publish Friday 25th October
Try to bring the results together in the form of a 'Conference Report'.

Each thread will include 'Collaboration' and 'Google Groups' in the title so I'm hoping they'll be findable.

The objective is to explore methods and mechanisms that can be used 'natively' here on google groups, that facilitate collaboration on 'projects' - without any additional software.

Longwinded I know but it's an experiment and so far responses have been good. There's still time for plenty more though so, before this thread closes for business on Wednesday, please do post if you are a group user with thoughts on collaboration.

Thanks again!

[Rizwan Ishak]

1. As Tony pointed out: No upvoting mechanism. Lot of good posts doesn't
get attention because the only way for people to show approval is by
comments. I am sure there are a lot of lurkers in this forum, given the
number of its members and the fact that all we usually see is some regulars
& few newbies with questions.
2. Upvoting also helps to identify the top posts by sorting. Most commented
post is not always the best post.
3. The Google forum mechanism of bringing to top whichever is commented
last is a pitfall. In this very forum this feature is exploited by few to
litter the top slots with worthless posts. If a post should reach the top,
it should be because the community decided that it should have their votes,
not because some over-enthusiastic guy is willing to shamelessly necrobump
it over and over again.
4. If a particular user is not already participating in a thread, it is
hard to notify him. An ideal platform for collaboration should notify a
user when his name is mentioned.
5. Also lack of a wiki in the forum.
6. This is the later half of 2010s. Unlike the 90s, people consume most of
their content via mobile phones. And yet, google forums does not have an
app for Android or iPhone. The mobile version of the forum is a joke. It
doesn't let you see the comments in the tree style, subscribe to a topic,
or even edit the comments properly.

Sincerely,
Riz

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[Watt]

Thanks for the response Riz,
I'll add your points to the forthcoming Agenda thread where I hope the discussion will take place. Hope that doesn't count as necrobumping, this approach is a bit experimental.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Watt wrote:

I'm interested in methods of collaborating on 'projects' here on Google Groups and I'd like to ask for your help in organising a virtual 'Conference' here on the forum to look into it.

My broad thoughts ... also after having read other people's comments; & having changed my mind several times over 2 years about what might work well.

FORA to work in? ...

1 - I agree with many of the comments in this htread on the inadequacy, the cumbersome nature, of GG for sustained documentation. 

Plus its weaknesses on phones. 

There are many tools that could be used that are superior. 

But whether they can be sustained in a seperate issue... See below.

2 - The other tool considerable numbers already here have access to is GitHub. 

In fact Arlen recently started an account that he hopes might be used to document.

I'm not sure how ammenable GitHub would be but it does have upvoting and reasonable discussion ("Issues") aspects.

And, important, its already familiar to many.

   However ...

3 - I also want to underline the fact that the ongoing solutions that appear on GG all the time CAN feed into documentation of a type. 

For instance Mohammad's several wiki that are themed are useful resources that form a kind of "usage guide" to several topic areas.

I enjoyed adding some answers to his questions about regular expressions.

I have quandries about SUSTAINABILITY.

1 - Looking back over a couple of years of attempts to improve over GG by using other Fora, both for documentation and issue solving

they were good initiatives but, I think true, that none proved sustainable longer term. 

2 --My feeling about this (purely intuition) is, at base, we don't have  enough active people to properly sustain a futher seperate forum.

I have queries about what is the suited format FOR CONTRIBUTION.

1 - Speaking for myself, I like to enjoy writing something that is needed in the limited areas where I have competence....

2 - ... And where the question/topic someone else provides, so ...

3 - ... a distinction between "framework auteur(s)" and "content writers" may be a useful one?

4 - Elsewhere I mentioned that Q & A format might be worth thinking about because it is self-contained discrete components.

This differs from a more structured TOC seamed approach which I think also good, but (guessing) may be harder to bring together.

OVERALL ...

1 - GG itself does contain vasts numbers of posts that are (fragment) proto-docs.

2 - There are rich materials already written in many scattered wikis, especially regarding beginner help. 

These are, I think, seriously under-used. So I wonder if they might in some way be synthesised into one?

Just thoughts

TT

[Watt]

Thanks for the thoughts TT, there'll be a chance to discuss everything later I hope once the 'information gathering' stages conclude. Thanks for the input.

If anyone else wants to chip in please do - Any other techniques or workarounds you think might be useful when collaborating on a team project?

[ILYA]

My biggest showstopper with GG is that I have to be logged in to google account to be able to click on results from google search. I.e. I use google search to find a solution. It returns links to posts in GC. However these links do not work if I am not signed in (which I am usually not). Sometimes I can work around the issue by accessing cached version. However it works only in about 20% of the times.

Best regards,
iilyak

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[TonyM]

All,

We should not underestimate what value we can extract from the Mail archive, perhaps a little focused consideration about this would help.

Watt,

It would help if you restated clearly exactly what 'information gathering' you want from this thread and Stage. I think I get it but I see the thread wandering away.

Regards

Tony

[Watt]

Thanks Ilya, added to the list!

[Watt]

Thanks Tony,

Can you list a few pros and cons of the Mail archive over the standard GG interface from a collaboration point of view, for those of us who've never used it?

As regards clarification, when I started I'll admit I was thinking more of ways of leveraging Google Groups to facilitate collaboration on shared goals and tasks.

Specifically the mechanisms within a thread where everyone participating knows what the shared goal is but can't quite formalise the process of collaborating together to achieve it, maybe because the 'tools' aren't part of our vocabulary yet.

What are those tools and mechanisms? Do collaboration groups have to have leaders? How can decisions be agreed? What are the practical mechanics of reaching a group decision? Tasks allocated? How can users vote?

Can workarounds be implemented on Google Groups that allow thread participants to 'manage a project' collectively?

That was my original interest, but so far the responses are tending towards a general thumbs down for GG, full stop. Some very good points are being made about that and they'll be on the Agenda for discussion for sure.

I'm trying to avoid detailed discussion of anything here on this 'information gathering' thread.

In the meantime there's only 1 day left for submissions here before this thread closes. There are no wrong answers so please do post your thoughts and ideas about collaboration and the tools it requires. Many thanks.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

TonyM

We should not underestimate what value we can extract from the Mail archive, perhaps a little focused consideration about this would help.

Glad you mentioned that! I forgot to mention search (aka "How To Find What We Have Already!").

In fact, thinking about it, I'm now wondering if a tool such as Gloom is working on that aims to streamline different types of searches might not be really helpful (see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/6CDi2btLB80/hyDafqopBAAJ).

TT

[Cd.K]

How to search the Mail Archive: see FAQ mail-archive.com

No RegEx search. A little old-fashioned.

You need a grabber/crawler for power searching.

Are there similar services with better features?

The contributions to TiddlyWiki google groups are the value.

• topic
• post
• tag
• date (time)
• author

[Watt]

As promised to @Cd.K. I had a look at one of the Blender forums;

https://devtalk.blender.org/t/i-love-blender-so-ive-spent-a-bit-of-time-designing-a-better-ui-workflow-what-do-you-think/9693

Blender seems to be using the open source Discourse forum software;

https://meta.discourse.org/

Which offers some very attractive global forum features;

*Up-voting posts
*Sort posts by 'most liked'
*Easy copy links to specific posts
*Comment history
*Links to posts which answer particular points in a thread
*A lot of stats.
*Status badges for users
*Sortable tags
*create a wiki from a post
*And more...

Ilya has kicked off a discussion about it here;
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/TiddlyWiki/y0_tXU6b8oM

Obviously by now there are many more sophisticated alternatives to Google Groups and finding replacement software that could be migrated to painlessly would solve a lot of the problems users are outlining here about Google Groups.

It's definitely not off-topic. Forum functionality is an influence on collaboration for many so the question of alternatives will be on the Agenda for sure, but choosing new forum software wasn't the initial motivation for this particular Collaboration Conference exercise.

My starting point was 'Google Groups is limited but it is what we're stuck with, lets make the most of it'. It's still going after 14 years, can we squeeze some more uses out of it?

Maybe we're not stuck with it? Let's see, but if we were to replace Google Groups tomorrow the goal of this Conference would still be valid I think - to explore nitty gritty, coalface methods of collaborating within a thread on a shared 'project'. I think that problem will exist regardless of the sophistication of the forum software but we'll see what the discussion turns up.

I'm thinking practical questions like,

* 'how to call and carry out a vote among thread participants?'
* 'is a project leader necessary?'
* 'how to elect a Lead?'
* 'how to agree a decision?'
* 'how to allocate tasks?'
* 'how to agree a timetable?'
* 'how to monitor and track progress?'

Those practical questions are difficult to answer once a thread is up and running because it's very distracting setting up the rules of the game once it's started.

Hence this attempt to answer them outside of any ongoing thread.

I'm looking for low-tech, low maintenance, inventive answers to those practical questions really, dead simple methods of cooperating on shared projects, on Google Groups at the moment, but methods that are probably applicable on any forum software.

Is it as simple as asking 'who wants to collaborate?' or 'lets have a vote on that'?

Still time to post thoughts or solutions before we close here later today and move on to the Survey, thanks for your patience!

[Cd.K]

I am also involved in the Ilya discourse thread. The fact that Blender also uses this software is for me another big fat plus point for discourse.

But as you wrote, you also have to organize yourself in discourse and that is the obvious lack:

TiddlyWiki is not organized.

I've only recently started working with Tiddlywiki, GG, Develoment and haven't discovered any systematic organization besides github development cycles  yet.  
In contrast to Blender, who have thought through their organization and are constantly working on optimization (comprehensible in corresponding metaforums). 

I found TiddlyWiki after I decided to organize myself better with the help of wiki software. TiddlyWiki is an ingenious software, but also a toolbox and to get the best out of it, you need a good documentation. Unfortunately, this documentation is very well hidden. Once you've finally figured out how something works, you'll find a lot of systematic documentation. But this kind of documentation doesn't help you much in the beginning, because it is organized non-linearly.

I'm in the process of developing my first plugin and it feels more like hacking than developing to me.   

My overall impression is that the community is just like the software non-linear. In my eyes the biggest strength of TiddlyWiki and at the same time its biggest weakness.  

Watt wrote:

'm looking for low-tech, low maintenance, inventive answers to those practical questions really, dead simple methods of cooperating on shared projects, on Google Groups at the moment, but methods that are probably applicable on any forum software.

• raising awareness of the need for organizing collaboration
• creation of metaforum topics to discuss organisation measures
• establishment of an instance for the systematic evaluation of topics

[Lost Admin]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 7:27:54 AM UTC-4, Cd.K wrote:

...

TiddlyWiki is not organized.

...

I found TiddlyWiki after I decided to organize myself better with the help of wiki software. ...

Those two sentences in the same post made me laugh. 

You are so right.

I found Tiddlywiki for similar reasons. 

[Watt]

Haha - but it's fun! Thanks Cd.K. and Lost Admin. Great points!

Thank you everyone for your responses and contributions.

I'm going to close this thread and move on to Stage 2 - a short survey in a new thread. Then, finally, a 'Conference' in a week's time. Hope you'll be able to attend.