The sun is setting early. I went to cemetery to read. It's one of my
favourite places, between the edge of the city and the forest,
slightly elevated, a mere 10 minutes on foot from home, bathed in
the evening sun.
I was looking at some old emails I exchanged with @Greta@fosstodon.org, author of Gretzuni, at the end of 2021. I was speaking of collaboration and I immediately thought about yesterday's post, Struggling with cooperation.
This is something that took me a long time to learn about myself: I don’t work well alone. This is a thorny problem for me because at the same time I often feel like I'm a bad collaborator, as mentioned in yesterday's post.
In my life, inspiration needs to come from somewhere, so that is (very indirectly) also a reason to engage online on IRC or social media. I just need new things coming in, via feeds, boards, or books. I very much feel how putting things online makes a difference, even though most of the time nothing actually happens. The *potential* of some interaction is what fascinates me, I suspect. Perhaps I cannot help but project everything into the future and wonder: what if? What if somebody were to see it and leave a nasty comment. What if somebody has the exact same problem. The imagined outcomes influence the present. Which is why the power to imagine positive outcomes is important to me, and something I ask others: What positive outcomes do we expect to see?
The cultivation of trust is a difficult thing. I think the pandemic shows this all around us. Which is why I often think about “trust building measures”. In German it just rolls of your tongue, I promise: *vertrauensbildende Massnahmen…* 😆 I can see it at the office when thinking about how to help new developers get up to speed, how to encourage juniors to step up and take responsibility, and of course, restoring my faith in humanity when I’m feeling down.
As I was reading through my old wiki conference notes, I found this little nugget:
Angela Beesley talked about things that make WikiPedia work … the
importance of OffTopic: 75% of the articles are not articles: Talk
pages, user pages, talk pages for user pages, help pages, etc.
Wow, that is a lot of off-topic! It's what builds a sense of community, of trust, of belief in shared values (usually overestimated, unfortunately).
For myself, I'm interested in the *dialogue* as a collaborative endeavour. I think that for me, the dialogue has the most potential to achieve the goal. Greta puts it like this, in A generative mindset:
Do we really care about generating and co-creating, and can we help
each other to be more effective in this by bringing out each other’s
strong points?
That is a good goal to aim for.
With Platon’s Georgias fresh on my mind after an episode of In Our Time and considering my love of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps by Peter Adamson, a dialogue form does sound interesting. The form is old and I suspect it hasn't fallen out of favour because it still works.
The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
A dialogue in writing is my kind of happy place. For many years I thought wikis would provide this. Would a wiki for two work? I'm not sure. If we can edit what we write (unlike email), and maybe comment on each other's writing on the margins (I love marginalia), offering two voices instead of one, and an integrated back-channel on paper, perhaps it can be made even more interesting.
The use of sidebars to provide commentary by the author on the very text the author is writing is something I’ve seen a lot in role-playing books. I have used sidebars in my own writing, too. Unfortunately, I haven't tried using a sidebar with a different voice. An example of that would be offering rules in the main text and examples in the sidebar, or descriptions in the main text and personal advice in the sidebar. In Halberds & Helmets I offer notes in the margin but I freely move text from the main text into the margin and back depending on the needs of layout. So the difference in voice is very small. In Der Geist Mesopotamiens I have character creation in the sidebar; essentially a long running example. That works very well, too. But it's not a meta commentary in the form I'm envisioning it for a more interesting text – and certainly no model for two complementary wiki pages where one author gets to comment on the text of the other.
In short, I have some vague vision of marginalia and text ownership but nothing concrete to offer.
All of this flailing around is because video chat or audio calls are tricky, too. Do you transcribe them? Do you just think about what happened and then write it up? That's how meetings with clients go when I work for money.
For a while, Greta and I collected all our mails in a big text document, thinking that we might rewrite it one day. But that day never came. Instead, the document felt like a big weight to me. Now, a year or two later, I read through the emails again and there's that joy again. I can read those conversations and work them into a blog post like this one. This works well for me. The conversation was the important part.
It feels a bit like reading through old thread-mode pages on a wiki and replacing them with a distillation of what was said. Ownership disappears, somewhat. We build on each other's ideas, not on the exact words.
#Collaboration #Writing #Philosophy
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On fedi, @Greta@fosstodon.org answered:
Tokens of recognition are earned like the flint of mutual
hospitality, igniting shared light and bringing new warmth that was
not there before - we make space for each other to come into being.
This is so easily forgotten where dogmatic rhetoric (distant from
the spirit of xenia, expecting subservience) is cold through the
lack of what you named vertrauensbildende Massnahmen 😂 , which is
generous to riffs.
~ Hope I am not too epigrammatic here; miss our longer-form
dialogue!
I really like the email conversation that may or may not end up on wiki pages. Thread-mode being reworked into document-mode! There's time to digest what happened. Time for rumination!
Continued: Writing alone, together.