The Perils of Online Collaboration

There were plenty of issues with organising 11 people to create a single project over the internet. Communication was not the greatest, and I felt that many people were reluctant to share their opinions or viewpoints on the way things were being done. In extension of that, getting hold of such people meant messaging them privately. I ended up having to privately message almost 80% of the group, who had not been keeping up to date with the (admittedly overflowing) groupchat, just so that they were clear on what to do, when the deadline was, what the options of themes were and where to vote for their preferred option. UAL did not provide us with much in the way of resources to assist in organisation, and by the time this was vocalised to our tutors we had already found our feet and managed to set up a semi-functioning system. It would have been nice to have some sort of process that assisted in our organisation from the start, although I am hesitant to suggest one now without proper thought. Collaborating online with just one person is difficult, but 11 different people seemed almost an impossible task. And at the end, I only felt like I had collaborated with three or four of the group members, one of whom was my fellow dubbing mixer, Dean. The others, I felt I had just received files from, and the whole situation felt more transactional that collaborative, unfortunately. I do not know how to avoid this, but I suspect that smaller groups might help.

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