A3: Jon Baxter

I work in a research group on campus and we collaborate to write papers or reports often.  The group that I work with has eight people, and we can be thought of as a distributed cognitive system.  We have a few group goals when we have to write something.  First, it is important that our paper be of high quality, so that our audience enjoys it.  We also have to make sure we submit the paper by the deadline, which is set by a conference or our boss.  It's also important that everyone in the group gets what they want out of the experience.

We normally use Google Docs because we usually all want to be writing, editing, or commenting at the same time.  The tool is also really helpful for tracking changes and history of the document.  We first meet face to face to agree on a general outline and then assign people to write differenct sections.  More difficult sections may have multiple people working on it, and they will often meet in person.  Some standards that we employ that everyone understands are that a blue font means an assignment or a to-do, and a red font means that there is a disagreement that needs feedback from others.  Each person also has their own comment color so it's obvious who is commenting where.  These representations, once they are learned, help us achieve our goal quicker and more efficiently than if we were emailing back and forth.

Overall, but especially within a subgroup who is assigned to writing a section, our task is tightly coupled.  Our task has a fair amount of interdependence because some people are more experienced writers, and some people know more about certain areas that we need to write about.  Our task is also difficult and relatively non-routine, and there is sometimes uncertainty about how to write something well.  To be honest, since our task is tightly coupled, it would probably work better if we all spent more of our time in a room together so that we could ask questions and collaborate face to face and get feedback instantaneously.  The problem with that is scheduling eight people for a meeting every day is a very difficult task, and usually we have enough time where delays between questions and answers is okay.  So given that we have to use some kind of technology to help us collaborate, Google Docs seems like a good choice.