recommendations / experiences / thoughts on Google Docs collaboration

August 18, 2023 9:07 AM

Random strangers from all over the world! Surprise neurodivergences! Passion and principles! What are your best techniques for writing various projects including articles, policy documents, how-to guides -- nonfiction with purpose -- collaboratively, particularly using Google Docs tools?

A group I'm in will do a lot of collaborative writing, and decision making FWIW, collaboratively. Google Docs is a tool of choice.

I've found some great info on collaborative writing in general (especially at the UNC Writing Center site), but do you know of either:

- Specific techniques that make Google Docs collaboration work well? (not just cool features, but human-to-human protocols)

- Already-written articles about this?

- Bonus: how to help people with different writing experience levels work together well?

About to leave the computer for a few hours, but thank you in advance.

posted by amtho to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

Confusing question. What kind of collaborative writing do you have in mind? How many are writing and otherwise participating? What kind of documents?
posted by crazy with stars at 5:52 PM on August 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you for the feedback, sincerely.

Assume a group of 2 starting on a semi-complex user guide, that grows by adding a person every so often over the course of 5 weeks.
posted by amtho at 3:30 PM on August 19, 2023

Response by poster: But honestly, I don't care about specific advice. I want _any_ thought people have about the human side of using Google Docs and that toolset collaboratively.
posted by amtho at 3:31 PM on August 19, 2023

At a past job i was forced to use Google Docs, for several years. To be frank, it was a huge relief to no longer have to use it. In my experience it was not at all useful and having to use it was a pain for all. This was for jointly authored work documents, some similar to user guides. The main problem was related to the permissions and ownership functions but also for some collaborators the formatting features which at least in the version we used differed slightly (but enough to annoy, especially in spreadsheets) from regular Word and Excel.
I think if all collaborators know the features (formatting, edit permissions etc) well and at the same level it would work better.
Before using Google Docs, we used to share those docs through a drop box and just used change tracking in Word, and it was so much easier.
posted by 15L06 at 7:45 AM on August 20, 2023

In my experience what has worked was having an individual person in charge of a document or a section of a document and having everyone else make comments and suggestions on sections that weren't theirs. I think it would depend what kind of doc you were creating--lots of subheadings and bulleted lists would make it easier to introduce content to other people's sections. But I don't know to what extent you need to have someone in charge of QA or coherency or whatever.
posted by gideonfrog at 8:52 AM on August 21, 2023