Education/Open Source Workshop

Technically Facilitated Collaboration

• Historically, projects have been less complex and people more focussed: Someone spent an entire lifetime carving a staircase out of a single tree trunk. As the size and complexity of projects increases, and the volume of prior knowledge in the project's context increases, the number of people needed to work together on a project increases. As does the complexity of their communication and collaboration. So we have more people exchanging more information about a project than ever before, enabling very advanced projects, such as going to the moon, Linux, other better examples? But the collaboration has overhead. So discovering new social and technical processes for highly parallel, highly collaborative work is key.
• What does this have to say about diversity? I have some material on privileged, dominant groups. Is increased collaboration anti-oppressive or does it favor dominant social norms? On the one hand, the need and capacity for more participation is involving people from around the world. However if the tools or processes are designed by and for dominant social groups like straight, white, North American men, they're reinforcing dominant norms.