Case Story: Collaborative Bid

Summary
Group / workshop		Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

A team involving about eight partner institutions, with several people in each institution, and spread across Europe, collaborating for several months putting together a funding bid

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

To discuss strategy and policy, coordinate effort, allocate tasks, and produce bid document

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

Face to face meetings were impractical so we decided to try web video-conferencing software "e/pop" but reverted to using telephone conferences

We started to put the bid document together on googledocs, and subsequently on zoho

We started a wiki (pbwiki) for collecting information

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Some partners had difficulty with the video conferencing, largely because of insufficient bandwidth . We reverted to telephone conferences, which proved robust and effective.

We had trouble with the collaborative writing platforms:

1) Google doc - proved unreliable, especially when multiple individuals were working on the document simultaneously (even as few as 2 were problematic) - changes would not be saved, document would freeze, etc

2) Zoho - same problem as Google, plus document became inaccessible for a few hours once or twice

In the end we reverted to emailing updated versions, with strict versioning control, to the person coordinating the bid.

The wiki was in general very reliable and appropriate for what we used it for

• storing minutes, timelines, action points, contact details, summaries of

papers etc.

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

Use of technology in collaborations can go only as far as that of the "weakest" member of the team.

There are scaleability issues with some technologies - eg. bandwidth with videoconferencing or skype can cope only with a limited number of users

Both Google and Zoho are not (yet) suitable when handling large long documents - both have poor functionalities for internal navigation in the document. In addition, tracking changes and adding comments was ambiguous - although I cannot remember the detailed reasons for this any more

There are scaleability issues with collaborative platforms:

in terms of complexity of document - they assume small, bite-size collaborations

in terms of number of users -inappropriate for a number of users

Is the philosophy of web2.0 small self-contained chunks? This is not compatible with formal, complex, products. ie. perhaps collaboration is not the only driver of web2. 0? Is the purpose of Googledocs essentially collaborative brainstorming?

Licensing

This document has not been assigned a license.