Potential for Global Collaboration?
Following on from the last blog post ... Accelerated Growth Across Small World Networks ... this blog very briefly documents some mostly small scale collaboration between geo-separated colleagues.
What Were the Projects?
Projects were both smaller and medium sized collaborations as judged by effort and timescale ... They included projects to develop:
A brief historical perspective and blog on societal change and current prospects for devolution
A programme for improving leadership in managers
A learning repository to support regional collaboration
Methods and techniques for collaborative team building
Project 1 is quite small, involving only two people, with the owner in New York.
Project 2 took place originally in the Indian Ocean, and involved several folk feeding back on research findings.
Project 3 is evolving in New Zealand, and is looking in time for funding to help it grow.
Project 4 is taking place in Florida, with the owner being a publishing dynamo, having a wide-ish audience of interested parties, and supporting and being supported through a "PhD for All" project. Project 5 is taking place nominally in London, UK, with a number of decent sized Facebook groups containing audiences and possible collaborators.
How Were Contributions Made?
All five projects contributed in some measure to each other. Contributors were expected to make the best contribution they could in what time they had available at that time. We could use the expression Michael Josefowicz has adopted: Notice, Engage, Mull & Exchange. NEME for short. In each case, contributors had to judge what they could contribute, and whether any overlap with their own project meant they could contribute more or only fleetingly.
What Happened and Why?
All five projects made progress despite total lack of financial resource. This means all project participants needed to share a number of personal qualities to be able to make effective and timely contributions:
Resourcefulness and resilience
Consideration for others
Trust in one another
An ability to listen and respond to feedback
Working in each other's language subsets where possible
Conclusions
All project participants are enlivened by contributions across our projects, with contributions ebbing and flowing as other participants add their time, consideration and effort as they can afford it.
In this way, progress is being made, across very diverse skill and language sub sets, and with surprising progress despite the complete lack of funding available.