Find Your People

The best collaborative writing projects emerge naturally from curious people who have similar questions coming together to answer them. If you have an idea that’s not yet socialized, you can start by talking to other people to gauge who wants to be involved. Some ways to reach people include:

• Bring the idea up to an appropriate community of practice or professional group to see if others are interested. Send a message to the group’s listserv, Discord, Slack, or other community space; or find contact information from the coordinator(s) and ask about the best community venue for socializing your idea.
• Talk about the idea to your peers and see if they have the same questions.
• Schedule virtual or in-person coffee meetings with people you think might have similar research interests.
• Write a blog about your research questions and share it around to get engagement.
• Post about it on social media and see if it resonates with others there.
• Present about the idea at a conference.
• Use an exploratory conference panel as inspiration to develop a collaborative writing project.

Working in Community

Where are the other people who care about your research interests and goals? Try to identify an existing community of practice that you can contribute to and engage with. You will find collaborators, co-authors, reviewers, and users in your community of practice, making audience identification a straightforward task. Communities of practice can also be great hosts of projects and publishing infrastructure.

Most of my experience comes from working with collaborative writing groups within communities of practice. Sometimes that means an organization built around a particular discipline or interest, and sometimes it means an ad-hoc group that has emerged through grant projects or other multi-institution projects. For example:

• The Digital Library Federation (DLF) hosts many working groups and supports publishing the research outputs of their working groups. The groups are entirely self-directed. I co-founded the Born-Digital Access Working Group at DLF with the intention to work with a fiscal host that was accustomed to supporting decentralized work.
• DLF’s fiscal host the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) also provides some publishing opportunities, particularly through the Pocket Burgundy publishing series.
• The BitCurator Consortium and the Software Preservation Network are digital archiving communities of practice that invite people to form research and publishing groups (among many other activities!).
• The publication Good Practices for Acquiring Email was developed by the The Email Archiving and Preservation Interest Group, whose startup was funded by a Mellon Foundation and University of Illinois regrant program for building capacity and community for web archiving.
• The National Digital Stewardship Alliance, hosted by DLF, administers essential field-wide research on digital archives practice and infrastructure trends. They also develop best practices. Anyone can join and start a digital archives research project.

My list is a specific slice of a niche library discipline, digital archives, and I could still go on with many more examples of great communities to engage with. Research the organizations, communities, and ad-hoc groups related to your topic by reviewing professional association websites, asking colleagues if they know of anyone, and perusing your professional social media networks. If you aren’t already a member of a community you think might be a good fit, then figure out how to get involved and express your interest. Communities have varying membership models, but many (including ones I list) have opportunities for individuals to participate at no cost.^[1]

If you don’t have a community in mind, maybe you’re building a new community! It will be less straightforward how to identify your core audience without a host community, but that’s okay.

Right-sized Recruitment

The more people you bring together, the more time and effort coordinating all their wonderful contributions will take. 4-6 people is a good size for a group with one coordinator. If you have more coordination and project management support available within or outside the group, you may be able to manage a larger author team. Larger groups require intentional working structures that accommodate subgroups or subcommittees.

Review the section on roles to consider your recruitment needs. There are certainly enough roles to fill for many people to join in, if there is capacity to support them! Recruiting for specific roles on the team can be an effective way of filling the roles. Prospective collaborators respond more readily to specific needs than broad calls to “join the group.” They also need to understand the research topic and goals, or the plan for developing them.

Use empathetic communication with potential collaborators. Establish and then honor the project’s boundaries: Create a plan for how you will say “no” if interest in being in the writing group exceeds the capacity of the coordinator(s). For example, thank them for their interest and invite them to participate in a data gathering or review process when the project reaches those stages. Remind them that you are committed to honoring their contributions if they participate in this way.

Onboard the group by establishing group expectations, research questions, and goals together. If you take on new members during the course of the project, set aside time to onboard them.