Team solutions #1: Text development

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.