Thing 18, 19 and 20: Collaborating

Getting together for meetings and sharing of data, reports and articles used to be a face-to-face interaction with the exchange of physical material. It then went electronic with the aid of email and the internet, but still requiring your physical presence in a meeting. Now, you can get together and exchange ideas via webinars, live podcasts and Skype, either by video or text based chat rooms.

I find webinars to be a fantastic tool to host online lectures. I have frequently attended them at my current and previous workplace, with the added benefit of having it run in the background while you continue with other work on parts you may have had minimal interest in. Webinars attended included ones hosted by: Vaisala Instruments, Net Composites and Simon Zuchi (property expert). Google Hangouts, a text based chatroom, is not something I would look into hosting. Mainly, due to the current un-popularity of Google+ when there are already other more established and commonly used formats, such as Skype.

Organising meetings are now an avoidable annoyance, as when there is any more than 3 people finding a universal slot is hard to come by. So by “Doodle Poll-ing” and offering multiple time slots it is possible to find the most common date and time for all delegates. Most excellent when your supervisors are so busy that you start to suspect that they maybe Batman! (* other superheroes are available, i.e. The Thing).

Finally, file sharing is so simple now that there is no need to even download the full file, simply view online and do as you please with it. Through Dropbox you can setup a singularity in internet space for select persons who can all upload, download and edit the files in these folders. Useful for projects that may span across a company or institute where people from other departments may only see each other on an as needs basis. Again, I would not actively set-up a Google Drive for a project due to its relatively low popularity. However, would have a personal one for files if Google Mail was my primary email.

* Edit: Yes, I do see the irony in posting this on a Google based service

 .CJ*