MoonEdit: Redux

Commentary Software Development

Last year, Aza wrote an article about how MoonEdit enabled us Humanized folks to do some painless collaboration. Someone recently posed the question:

[A year] after that posting, do you still make a lot of use of collaborative editing for recording group talk and crystallizing it into more cohesive documents?

The simple answer is: No.

We hardly use real-time collaborative editing anymore. I’m really glad this question got asked, because it forced me to evaluate how our work flow evolved over the past year. Aza’s article remains as true as it was when he wrote it: MoonEdit enables some a very powerful and easy collaboration system. So why don’t we use it anymore?

Several reasons.

(1) We got offices with whiteboards. Even before we got an office we got together every single day in the same place with consistent access to really big white boards. For architectural and design discussions, these two tools (white boards and physically being in the same place) cannot be beat. Ideas happen faster, get refined faster, get drafted and drawn (which is often better than getting typed), get erased and replaced with better ideas, etc.

(2) Google Talk started saving all of our chats in Gmail. For the purposes of communicating necessary information in a way that can be referenced and searched, GMail is hard to beat. I can find anything sent to me since my last year of college, which is extraordinarily useful. When I want to note soemthing down, I send it to myself as an email. When I need Aza to explain something about his mockup, I poke him on Google Talk Only for specialized purposes (tracking customer contact across multiple people, for instance) would I consider breaking out of the Gmail communication tool set.

(3) We realized we had to stop having everyone contribute on everything. No, I’m not joking. When everyone was a part of every decision meeting, we were not able to actually get things done. Full meetings are necessary, are the essence of idea creation, but not where the idea gets implemented. A process evolved where…
…everyone met and argued about what the document/architecture/design was supposed to be…
…Andrew wrote a draft…
…Aza rewrote it…
…Andrew reverted Aza’s edits, but then rewrote to accommodate the issues brought up by Aza’s edits…
…Atul fixed all of Aza’s and Andrew’s typos, and inserted a complaint about that one paragraph that makes no sense…
…Andrew fixed the paragraph…
…Jono rewrote half the grammar and grumbled about “its” versus “it’s” and how we should know the difference by now…
…we all signed off on a version and called it a [blog post, document draft, architecture outline, etc.].
The players changed from time to time, but the process was intact. Only one stage of it really made good use of a good real-time collaborative editor; and we weren’t using any software at all anymore for that stage (see comments above about whiteboards).

We still maintain an internal MoonEdit server, ready to fire up a session when we can’t do whiteboards or generative a lot of text: there have been times with tools like Google Docs were just to slow to enable real-time collaborative document creation. But the web-based tool chain for collaborating has improved markedly, and being together in the same place fills the special highly dynamic role that MoonEdit used to. We learned, in this case, that technology is no replacement for the simple techniques that have enabled people who are near each other to work together ever since the man first drew a circle in the sand to describe his idea about this new wheel-thing.