Collaboration

A few weeks ago, a friend invited me to google wave. I tried it out, thought it was pretty cool, & promptly forgot about it. Tonight, I was re-introduced to the tool. My old partner Will & I decided to use it to collaborate on Peak Oil answers. In just over an hour we cut about 5 pages of cards on peak oil. And I'm not talking about the kind of thing where you copy & paste a single article from Lexis & call it a brief: we had about 4 or 5 different sources & all the articles were '08 or later.

This session brought to light several things I've been missing out on the last few months of research. First, the power of collaboration. It is so much faster to work with someone when you're briefing. For example, imagine you're working with a group of 4. One person could work Google news &/or scholar, one person could work Lexis, another person could work Ebsco, & a fourth person could compile what the others find. As long as you know what you're looking for ahead of time, this really could save a ton of time & promote efficient research. I think this approach would probably work best when you focus on a single argument, like hegemony answers, or warming. The second thing I realized is the power of google wave to help organize collaborative research. Sure, the formatting & such could be better, but I like the fact that it allows multiple people to paste cards in real time & view each others work as it's happening.

With that said, is anyone interested in organizing a wave research session? If so, comment with a way to contact you, whether or not you need a google wave invite, & a topic you'd like to research jointly.