Facilitation and Project Management

Organization and transparency is required for a collaborative group to be efficient, maintain trust, and stay engaged in the project.

Many of the tactics for building an open and flexible environment boil down to “be organized.” Be prepared to facilitate and maintain transparency by communicating decisions and keeping key documents updated. Setting these norms up early in the project will make it easier to keep everyone on the same page as you move along.

Keep communications and documentation direct and brief. Provide accessible summaries or lists that are quick and easy to read, while also providing links to the full information in case some people want to review the details.

Keep drafts in a centralized location that everyone on the team can access. On networked platforms, creating a central repository of documents is usually as simple as creating a folder in the agreed-upon platform, sharing it with all individuals on the team, and ruthlessly reminding everyone to either create documents in the folder or move them there when they forget. A central repository or folder cuts down on the amount of individual links team members must keep up with to find project documents. Later when you develop outreach communications or presentations about your work, you will find that you have what you need to create those stories in one place.

Accessing and operating platforms can be major inhibitors to efficient group work. Make sure everyone understands where and how to work. Have a method of version control that helps group members stay up to date with the latest draft. Share the link to the latest draft often in emails or other documentation.

Communicate

Share notes from meetings and summarize decisions for everyone so they are clear on how the group is moving forward. Help prevent leaving anyone behind by communicating decisions to the whole group in writing after they are made.

Divide the Work

You can divide the work by talking as a group and coming to a natural conclusion about who will do what. It’s important for people to do work that inspires them. If there’s something that no one wants to do, don’t force it: find another co-author or find some funding to pay someone else to do the dirty work.

Another option is to create a spreadsheet with the topics and sections and ask people to sign up. Often these systems don’t get as much engagement as meeting face to face, but sometimes groups need an asynchronous sign up tool to accommodate everyone’s needs.

Forms are not a recommended format for work sign ups. The goal of distributing work is to collaborate to fill all of the needs, which requires knowing what other people have already signed up for. Forms are not designed to communicate data back to the group. While it might feel organized to the coordinator to collect data in this way, most form tools do not allow participants to see and consider each other’s responses.

Just as in the writing phase, each group member can take a topic or section to “own” for the editing round.

Often the same person works on the same topic or section throughout the project, particularly if the publication hasn’t changed structure or section headings much since the first draft phase. But depending on the group’s needs, desires, and the structure of the text, you could also re-tool who is working on what at this point in the publication’s workflow. Maybe one person is sick of working on a section and wants to switch, or maybe the changing structure of the publication requires you to revisit assignments. At least take a moment to check in and reconsider before diving into editing.

Enable maximum participation

If not everyone could attend these strategic conversations who wanted to, consider an alternate way of engagement. This could be as simple as having a short phone call with them to chat about their curiosities, or asking the participant to email you their thoughts for consideration.

Manage Time

Set timelines that align with the group’s capacities. When you are in control of your own timeline, you may be able to move things along at a quicker pace. On the other hand, some projects get stuck in collaborative editing hell for years, and projects can fizzle out as people get burned out or life happens to divert their attention, leaving almost-finished work on the table. But hopefully this guide is helping you avoid those pitfalls!

Prioritize Team-building

Give your team plenty of time to get to know each other. Take the time to set up as much administrative stuff as possible early, so that the rest of the project can be the “fun” part, and your progress doesn’t get held up by building infrastructure on the fly. If you are on a tighter deadline, scale small, and plan to build as you go. Never skip getting-to-know-you time in the beginning, even though that might sound like “fluff” rather than the real work. But building a rapport is crucial for any team on any timeline to succeed, and should be prioritized.

Considerations for Research Timelines

Researching together without funding is a tall order. Research takes individuals many concentrated hours of time to complete. If you are starting from the point of data collection and need to develop a survey or devise some method of gathering information from primary sources that will need to be analyzed, you have a big project on your plate. You’ll need to be patient with yourself and your colleagues! You might want to split applied research projects into two parts over at least two years, one for research design and data collection, and another for analysis, writing, and publication.

Pace your Writing

Allow for plenty of space to write. Some people can only write for short periods of time and need to take breaks in between. This is usually good for writing, because it gives the brain some time to further organize thoughts. Your writing group may be full of overworked people who are finding time to write around the edges of their schedule. Many a tenured professor have lamented that they are only able to find the space and time to write during sabbatical! You might want to break down the goal of writing a draft into smaller milestones to reach depending on the scope of your project and capacity of members involved. This could be the date by which research should be complete; a date by which you should have written 20% of your draft, etc. Individual progress can be very difficult to execute, and writing is a particularly daunting task. Depending on the needs and capacities in your group, you might want to schedule some coworking sessions to get writing done in a supportive space.

Rest

After each milestone is complete, celebrate the milestone and reward yourself with a period of rest.

Consider Time Zones

We can work together across time and geography with the help of technology, but it isn’t easy. If you have a group of people that spans across time zones, you will need to consider all of those zones in scheduling.

Sometimes it is impossible to include all time zones that are present in the group. I have been in international groups that included members from Eastern Standard Time, Central European Time, and Australian Eastern Time, making it impossible to choose one time to meet that was reasonable for all. Unfortunately people in some time zones may not be able to participate synchronously, but coordinators can engage asynchronous members with specific asynchronous tasks, and email or voice recordings can help exchange feedback. The coordinator can also rotate the timing of calls so that sometimes it favors the time zones that would normally be left out of the synchronous call.

Make sure that time zones are shared when needed in communications, and consider that words like “today” and “tomorrow” do not mean the same thing across time zones. For example, our Asia-Pacific time zone colleagues are 16 hours ahead of the US east coast, basically a day’s difference.

Deadlines

The person or people coordinating the project should set suggested deadlines that align with the group’s capacities, and check in to remind people of the deadlines. The Community Publishing Workflow figure gives a sense of how long each step of the process takes in relation to other steps. Meetings help people honor deadlines. Schedule check ins periodically to give people a chance to talk through anything that is making them hesitate or preventing them from moving forward. Give everyone at minimum one week to respond when making decisions over email, and at least two weeks to review documents or provide feedback on longer pieces.

As you establish and move deadlines together, be kind to yourselves. While you may have some deadlines set by funders, institutional hosts, or key strategic considerations, overall the work is low stakes, and usually deadlines may be shifted. Make sure group members know that they should communicate as timelines need to shift. Shifting timelines to match capacity will prevent burnout. No matter how much time you plan out, something in the process will take much longer than you expect and timelines will be shifted, so it’s no fault of anyone involved when a timeline must shift. However… you should be working towards finishing or sunsetting a project. If it feels like the timeline is getting pushed too far out and people are consistently unable to meet their commitments, check out the section on Getting Unstuck.

Manage Energy

The energy in the room is an important ingredient in collaborative writing projects. The group culture will not coalesce in meeting one. Group culture is developed over time. Throughout the process, keep asking yourself how the group is building flexibility into activities, and how the project can morph to meet its participants’ needs.

Accessibility

It’s impossible to build a perfectly accessible space that meets the needs of everyone before the group gets started. Accessibility is an active process of checking in and being flexible. Check in periodically with the group on how they are feeling about the project and their work overall. If you are a group coordinator, make sure everyone has what they need to move forward. All group members should voice any barriers they have and share as honestly as they can how it’s going for them.

Check In

Having explicit space to do check in is key for maintaining a flexible environment. Make intentional check in time on periodic agendas, especially if your meetings are usually packed with items to discuss. Your check in can be as simple as asking a question in a virtual meeting about how people are feeling about the work, and asking participants to respond using the meeting chat with 1-5, 1 being not good at all and 5 being great.

You might check in when the group vibe overall seems overwhelmed or stressed out; you might check in if there’s a lot of silence or low engagement. You might check in when everything seems fine! Getting to hear how the work is going every once in a while may reveal some tweaks to your project structure or norms that improve the experience for everyone, even if it was already going well.

These are all good practices for facilitation. Facilitation is maintaining the vibe. If you are interested in developing facilitation skills, training is available from organizations such as the Anti-Oppression Resource & Training Alliance (AORTA).

Getting Unstuck

Writing from one brain is hard, adding several brains to the writing process is harder, and asking anyone to read it and comment can bring a mixed bag of feedback that is difficult to address. How can you keep your head up when you’ve been editing a collaborative publication for 6 months since community review closed and still haven’t gotten to the copyediting stage?

Here are some tips to help you make it through the process.

Take stock

Take a moment to inventory what the project has in place and consider if there are any “easy” answers to why things move slowly or people experience barriers to engaging. Make sure you are organized enough that people can participate. Set deadlines to encourage progress. Check in and see if you can provide support.

It’s a learning process 

You are here for a learning process, and learning processes have their own timelines. Let learning take a while. The longer you work on the topic, the more of an expert you will become on the topic. As long as you have a plan – which hopefully this guide helped you put together – you know there is a finish line. To get the full benefit of a collaborative project, work through questions and barriers in community with each other. Enjoy the ride and soak up the knowledge.

You’re allowed to rest

Honor rest. Take breaks between milestones. Step away for a couple of weeks if the group hits a wall. Take the publication off everyone’s to do list and free yourself from the need to complete the work. When you return, join together in a meeting space and facilitate an exercise that gets people refocused, hopefully with renewed energy. Sometimes when taking time off from working on a piece, we make space for absorbing new information that creates connections and paths forward with our writing we couldn’t see before.

Talk to team members when energy is low

Coordinators who are concerned about a peer’s progress with completing the shared work can ask questions about what would be supportive for them. Even if you feel like you have done a lot to make resources available to the group, don’t assume that everyone has what they need. Our individual needs vary. It is up to individuals to ask for what they need, and communicate with the coordinator(s) about their needs. But sometimes it can be hard for people to identify their needs, so that is one place you can start if needed, helping people identify what’s holding them back. People might need help delegating, talking through the work to re-center their inspiration, or identifying that they should let go of the project altogether to allow it to move on.

If the majority of the group is too busy to hold time on their own schedules to write alone, set up some co-writing sessions. At the beginning of the session do a check in where everyone says what they’re working on today. At the end regroup to see where everyone got, what barriers came up, and what their next step is. It may feel like more work to meet synchronously, but some people need synchronous meetings because they provide accountability and space to finish projects, especially self-directed ones.

Do less work than you planned

This goes for just about any project. Project ideators always underestimate some aspect of the project from the beginning: how much labor or time some part will be, like data collection, or audience identification: challenges that require more thought and time to work out than we anticipated. That’s to be expected: A project plan is just an imagination; what happens is real and requires adjustments to our imagination. As you move along the project in reality, keep asking yourself how to pull back and make the project less “work” as you encounter tasks or goals that aren’t working or seem to be requiring too much of your capacity. Do you even need to do the difficult task to achieve your overall goals? Maybe, but make sure to ask yourself before you assume the gruel is necessary.

If you find the project is difficult to move forward on because it has gone way beyond the original scope to the point the collective can no longer effectively manage it without burning out or extending the timeline in an extreme way, it’s time to rescope. Rescoping is normal and taking the time to do it can alleviate barriers and reinvigorate participants to move forward. Revisit notes from earlier planning activities to revisit your scope.

Use the Community Review to help you accept loss instead of expanding the work. You may have to cut great work. Maybe you have drafted and received comments on a five-section document, but the fourth section needed a lot more research to complete, and the comments from the community didn’t indicate a strong interest in the content. Sounds like an opportunity to cut! In your publication, you can address inquiries you’ve cut as recommendations for future research and work.

Work Joyfully

Injecting joy into the process is necessary for just about any project to feel fully rewarding. Community publishing work is often unpaid, and unpaid work needs an incentive on the other end to feel rewarding to the volunteer: personal growth, community connection, etc. A common incentive is that the activity is simply enjoyable to the person. Collaborative writing projects should feel joyful, so if you think this could be the group’s barrier, consider some ways to inject joy into your collaborative work.

1. 🎉 Celebrate small wins and milestones alike, even if work gets done on a different timeline than you thought it would. Don’t acknowledge that work is “behind” in the same space as celebrating completion of the work. Don’t let those expectations you put on yourself steal the joy of doing the work you’ve accomplished! Share your goals with the team, and cheerlead each other as you each make progress on your contributions.
2. 🎶 Create a playlist of background music and play it at the beginning of co-working sessions or during brainstorming activities.
3. 🎲 Doing something completely different at the beginning of the call helps people transition to the new space from wherever they came, and refocus on the new task at hand. One standard way to get people to transition to focusing on the task at hand is to ask a fun icebreaker question at the beginning of each meeting. What ice cream flavor are you today? If icebreakers are not accessible social formats for your group, you still might be able to find something for people to look forward to at the beginning of each meeting.  For example, look for a five-minute game or activity that you could do at the beginning of each working session or check in. The possibilities are nearly endless on short activities that spark creativity and refocus people to the task at hand, so use your creativity, watch out for activities introduced in other spaces that you can emulate, and implement a fun component that matches the vibe and interests of group members.
4. 🌡️ Is there anything that you can gamify in the work? Are there evaluation points you are measuring that could also use to motivate your team throughout the process? I don’t suggest adding too much competition into what is meant to be a non-hierarchical, collaborative process, but some groups may have fun getting to a certain number of comments addressed, or a certain percentage of their writing completed.