<aside> 📖 Summary
Intercreativity—Collaborative Documents let big teams work on big documents collaboratively, even if the team members do not work together on a daily basis.
It let each author of the document create a personal draft of the document or a portion of it, work on it privately, share it with other people of their choice, and merge it into the official common version of the document when they feel comfortable.
It can be used for teams of expert consultants writing long reports or multiple organizations working on a business proposal or legal agreements.
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Table of Contents
From manuscripts and typewritten documents to the original computer-based word processors like MS Word, writing a document has been, until very recently, mostly a one-person activity.
Even with the advent of word processors, these too worked with computer files on one person's computer, and the sole process of sharing the file with others for their review was already a complex one, with endless email threads storing tens of funny named versions of each document.
It was just until some years ago that web-based tools, mainly Google Docs, started threatening the dominance of MS Word in the word processor market. They achieved this with a clear differentiation feature: real-time collaboration on a single document.
With the appearance of Google Docs, it is now possible to have multiple persons collaborating on the same document. This drastically reduces the friction for the author to share their work and receive suggestions and feedback, and it facilitates combining the inputs from other people into a single document.
However, the workflow is not that different from the one based on files and emails. It's just faster. There is one person who owns and writes most of the document content, and others who review it and provide feedback or minor editions.
Then, just recently, comes tools like Notion or Dropbox Paper, with a significant shift away from the standard document-based word-processors, and a look-and-feel that is closer to a web page.
In parallel to this technological evolution, user's expertise, and reliance on digital web-based tools have grown too.
This is creating a feedback loop where technology changes the culture inside a company, which changes the way in which that company uses the technology, which changes culture, even more, all of this in the direction of openness and collaboration.
As these cloud-based shared spaces like Google Docs or Notion become more and more widespread, the sense of a missing feature is starting to appear.
With MS Word and files, each person had their own perspective of a document. From the moment they received it on the email, to the moment they sent it back again, that version was theirs. It was private to them.
Yes, it was hard to manage all the versions of different users, but it was still useful that each user had their own one.
The problem with Notion and Google Docs is that once shared, there is only one version of a document on which all the authors are forced to collaborate.
This creates three problems: