When these cooperative authoring things work is really is an amazing experience! You get this moment when it becomes clear that a collective effort can be orders of magnitude more powerful.

I’m sure we can all call up some sympathy for this quote.

“The wonderful collaboration I had hoped for had turned into a circus of bullshit.”

A couple dozen experiences of that kind and despair emerges. You get
cranky. So it’s important to drag out, admire, and try to pick apart a bit the cases where it works.

Tools do seem to be making a difference here. A good bug database, the optimistic concurancy design pattern used in CVS, even something as amazingly simple as SubEthaEdit. It gives one hope that some what seems so hard may only be a misunderstanding about how to frame up the work.

Maybe we should call a meeting :-).