I’m not really talking about our *code* workflow, that has been traditionally SVN and as Derek and David have mentioned, we are slowly migrating at a comfortable pace to Git; currently our web presence is git-based and our code-base for our projects still lives on SVN.

No, I’m talking about less physical things: places for ideas, game design documents to pitch, to do lists, collaboration on user interfaces, art direction, and that sort of thing: the kinds of things that real people with real offices and real desks deal with in meetings and conference calls and that sort of boring old-school stuff.

We don’t currently have a centralized location to work out of: Nick and I live in Victoria, Derek is in Seattle and David is in Vancouver.  Thankfully we’re all close enough that when we really have to we can meet physically to, um, vote on important things (or drink beer).  That said though, the fact that we *don’t* have offices and water coolers around which to make the big calls has forced us to adopt some really cool tools to get our work done.

Failed systems, and why they failed:

Our wiki – attempt #1

The system we switched to immediately after the blue marker.  The wiki failed ultimately because there was no structure to the way we posted content, and when we had enough content on the system for it to actually be an all-encompassing document, because there were no rules for the way things were organized, it was just too confusing to use easily.

Tools which aren’t easy to use *for everyone* are actually less useful than no tool at all.

Google Calendar

We tried to use Google calendar to keep ourselves on-task, to keep track of deadlines and office hours.  This also didn’t work.  The cause: well, Google calendar isn’t really a to-do list device, it doesn’t have sufficient reminder capacity to allow one to keep track of deadlines easily (see above rule).  The reason the office hours didn’t work is that Nicholas and I operate on significantly different time schedules.  He’s nocturnal, I on the other hand try to get my work done during the day so I can spend my evenings having fun (but most of the time studying physics).

Working systems, and why we use them:

Google Wave

–  We got in on the google wave bandwagon early – something in our plea to google to use their system resonated with their strange collective intelligence.  What we were looking for was exactly what they were advertising: a wiki with the functionality of a chat program and a forum.  What we got was about 50% of each of those, which *isn’t* exactly what we needed.  Why do we keep using it?  It’s simple, very simple.  No one needs to sit down with it for longer than 10 minutes to understand about 90% of what it has to offer.  It also integrates well with the browsers we use (I think we’re 100% IE free, either Firefox or Chrome) so we don’t have to constantly be checking it in order to find out about changes.  Now, as I said, it’s not perfect.  Large documents are cumbersome at best on Wave, and while it handles to-do lists fairly well (and actually handles collaborative ones just as well), there is no calendar tie-in to keep track of milestones easily, nor are there effective tools for navigating large threads of conversation (things that happen very frequently)

Google Docs

–  I actually have nothing bad to say about Google Docs: I love this service.  It claims nothing but the ability to collaborate on documents, and since we write functional documents that have no requirements on their form, we can do this easily, well, and for free.  If there is one thing that I would like out of Google Docs that I’m unaware if it provides it would be notifications when collaborative documents are edited by someone else.

Google Talk

–  Yeah, if youre sensing a theme you’re right, we use a lot of google products in our workflow.  Nick and I started using google talk when he was working on a contract job that everyone was communicating on with the service, and as soon as he set up his Trillian to use it, I swapped over completely from MSN after firing off some messages about my change of address and never looked back.  Why?  Simple: easy, effective, cloud-based auto archiving.  I never need to remember details anymore when they’re searchable through my gmail interface.  Information-based nirvana?  Maybe not for you, but I have a terrible memory for minutia, so it’s close.

I’ve developed a reputation around here over the years of trying out all sorts of new things to improve our effectiveness at collaborating and producing, and honestly most of the new ideas are bad ones, but every once in a while you stumble on a modus operandi that actually makes everyones’ lives easier and happier, and that’s worth the price of a few annoying failures.

If you have any suggestions on other collaborative tools, feel free to share them!

-CD