One of the things that we spent a lot of time doing yesterday was watching our good friend Craig work on a mural project with his fellow artist friends, the Rust Belt Monster Collective. And as I watched their mural progress, I noticed something happening that has become, I think, so mechanical for many of us that work in IT. The natural flow of collaboartion between the artists. There was no status updates, no tweets, no file sharing, no enclosed private online meetings. Just a group of people working together for their common goal. So many times in the day job, (I work in IT at a large company and electronic collaboration is such a huge part of it), when I collaborate with others, it not face to face, side by side. It's going into a shared file location, updating a document, saving it back to the shared collaboration space and sending an instant message or an email saying that the task is complete. What I witnessed with the artists yesterday was just a natural flow of collaboration. Everyone was working on their own tasks for the project, but then one would stop and ask another for an opinion. The two would discuss different ways to approach the idea maybe calling in a third to get a different perspective. Then, it was back to work. It was refreshing to watch. Natural collaboration. I'm sure that outside of getting together for projects this group communicate with each other via electronic methods, but when it came down to it it was the whole working together without relying on making sure they had the right technology vendors product to collaborate.
I guess the point to my story here is, don't rely on technology to solve all your collaborative needs. Get off your butt, get in groups and solve the problem together. Not sitting across the room behind the computer at your desk.
Here are pictures from the event. Really hope to go back to it next year.
For the full set of images, click here
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