Thing 9. Online Collaboration Tools

Oh, what horrors those 23 Thing Bloggers, using the latest software collaboration tools and the Internet, did to our beloved Declaration of Independence...like a bunch of out-of-control monkeys, they proceeded to decimate our sacred founding fathers' document to show the world the value of modern collaborative work...good thing Thomas Jefferson had decided to do it all himself back then before Google Docs and 23 Things allowed the crazy masses to get hold of the project...

And good thing for me I can't be blamed as doing my part too, because I wasn't able to get into the editing mode for the document at all, pending some sort of special permission, which I am still waiting for, so was not able to add my own creativity to the mess that remains of America's original call for freedom...

I am wondering what collaboration really means though when anything concrete, say like a written document expressing a nation's need for freedom, has to get done...too much collaboration, by too many people, with too easy a tool provided by Google Docs or Zoho Writer, just might be a little too dangerous if we should go by the online example produced by my co-bloggers.

This might be time then to counter our zealous rush to collaborate just because we have the means, and just remind ourselves that there comes a time when just one good mind, hard at work, still is necessary to make any sense of something...I like the ability of these software tools to get everyone's hand into a project, but I can't help feeling that someone still has to lay down the rules and monitor the behavior, or chaos will pursue...even Thomas Jefferson knew that...

But I'm not against a little cooperation at times...if I remember my history right, before he submitted the Declaration of Independence to Congress, Mr Jefferson had his good buddy, Ben Franklin, look over his work and make his own suggestions and corrections...and then Jeff wrote them in...I bet he liked that slower delibrative process a lot better than having someone always looking over his shoulder, fighting him line by line using modern software tools to change things he had just written...but then again, with Zoho and Google Docs, maybe they could have done an even better job..after all, look what those guys did just using quills...