Johnnie Moore

Blogging and collaboration

Ton Zijlstra wonders how bloggers could collaborate more effectively and I ask myself the same question...
Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

Ton Zijlstra (crazy name sane guy!) always blogs thoughtfully. His latest post Making Actionable Sense asks how come we bloggers create so many loose ends without leading to a lot of action.

We together came up with the idea, so why should we not together turn it into action? Current reality is that we try to feed the ideas into our regular workflow and try to bring our colleagues into it. Most of our organisations however will not yet be layed out for the types of things we come up with here.

So, why not form ad-hoc (virtual) organisations, and create our own value adding networks. Bloggers together putting in proposals for conferences, defining projects etc. I’m not saying this is not being done already by some on some projects, but I am saying that we could be doing it a lot more. We feel like a community, so why not act like one. I think blogging is my first internet experience where there is a real bridge between my internet activities and my life off the net. Let’s broaden that bridge, blur the lines some more. Turn our loosely coupled blogging-get-togethers into small enterprising networks.

Of course there are models out there of techie things that are done this way; open source software seems to be built by the collective communitarian will of independent thinkers. The Cluetrain manifesto was a collaborative effort by bloggers though I don’t know if they were blogging at the time.

Like Ton, I’ve seen Wikis but not made use of them so don’t know if they are a small part of the way ahead.

I’m one of three people improvising our way towards a new book via a communal blog. It’s called the Mutualist Manifesto or Brand Activism, depending who is sitting at the controls on the day. This is being produced in a very improvisational spirit and it will be interesting to see where it ends up.

I know that via the net I can now tap into some pretty remarkable talents in different parts of the world. This is both exciting and frustrating. Exciting cos I really like these people and love the idea of working with them, frustrating because I’ve yet to discover how best to do it. I’ve seen a lot of putative collaborations fail because they don’t get to some kind of critical mass or level of commitment.

If I go to a complexity view (a la Snowden, see previous post) I think that I’m probably doing the right thing – trying stuff out – and should probably launch a few more probes and watch what happens.

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