====== Best practices for collaborative document development ====== * For any document of non-trivial length and more than 2 people, use some kind of shared access: * Source control (subversion, cvs, etc.) * Single shared-storage Office documents with change tracking * Google docs * etc. * Agree on minutae early: naming, style, point-of-view, voice, etc. Enforce these decisions, and explicitly make new decisions as soon as possible when new ambiguities arise. * Don't let an individual or part of the team go off and write part of the doc in isolation for an extended period of time. * Unless your writers have worked with each other for a while, the text you get back won't fit with the flow and style of other sections * There may have been a miscommunication as to the nature of the section * There is a tendency to put off completion of the section to near the deadline for the whole document, making editing or a rewrite impossible * For large groups, someone needs to be a technical executive have final say in decisions of scope and content. This is often not the same as the manager. * As your team grows, stronger leadership is required to limit meeting length, frivolous discussion, and the effects of standing disagreements. * more tbd