What collaboration tools do you favor?

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273 votes tallied
Etherpad or Hackpad
12% (34 votes)
Google Drive
27% (75 votes)
Email
27% (75 votes)
Wiki (your project's)
12% (32 votes)
IRC or other chat
11% (31 votes)
Other (tell us in the comments)
10% (26 votes)

Which of these collaboration tools do you use most?

Collabortation is part of the participation pillar of the open source way. It's how we hash out the details of a project, usher the best ideas to the top, and succeed in our communities of innovation.

There are many methods by which to collaborate. Which pulls out the very best in you and pushes you to new heights?

At Opensource.com, we use all of these tools. Some more than others. But, to be sure, we couldn't live without our collaboration tools, helping bring you the best stories and news about open source changing the world.

Share your favorite collaboration tool in the comments.

 

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12 Comments

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Shopgrunt | May 14, 2014
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I work in a sector where collaboration is unheard of. Shared drinking fountain is as close as we come. Privately, Google Drive, email, and irc are used in community building.

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Danie van der Merwe | May 14, 2014
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We use Alfresco ECM and Zimbra Collaboration Suite.

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Anikita | May 15, 2014
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Just one quick thing: Wunderkit is being wrapped into Wunderlist. They recently sent out a notice that Wunderlist 2 would basically integrate the best of both worlds in a simpler interface than Wunderkit's clumsy approach. Eager to see what will come out of that. <a href="http://www.govtportal.in/2014/05/cgbse-10th-class-exam-result-2014-check.html">CGBSE 10th Result 2014</a>

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Unidentified | May 15, 2014
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Kolab, via <a href="https://mykolab.com">Mykolab.com</a>

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Shane Curcuru | May 15, 2014
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Email. Both because I like it, and because it's the Apache Way.

Some people deride the ASF for being so email list bound [1], and in some cases they're right. But in most of the cases, they're missing the point.

The point of collaboration in Apache projects is to grow the community. Not just the community of the other rock stars zooming along with the latest technology, but the *whole* community. Not just people who currently have the time to be taking a project to a new level this week - but also the people who show up in a month or a year. Or, the people who don't have time to contribute every day, but only spend alternate weekends coding open source.

Even with change tracking, most SCM or etherpad or similar systems make it difficult for people who show up later to understand *how* the decisions were made. While it does take time to read through email threads, it explicitly and clearly shows new readers the process by which decisions were made and communicated, as well as the end result.

The difference might be between: is your goal to get more code done? Or is your goal to grow your community? Personally, I'm for the latter: people are far more interesting in the long run than code.

[1] I completely admit that I hate the ASF's default mail list archive software, mod_mbox, just as much as it deserves. I'd love to see us have an interface as nice as apache.markmail.org or the like, but ENOTIME. 8-)

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Pete | May 16, 2014
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What about integrated collaboration platforms a-la Bitrix24 or its clones? We use that and it everything from shared drive to group chat and wikis. How do I vote?

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Diana | May 16, 2014
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I would like to add www.proofhub.com - online collaboration tool. It is super simple and easy to use.

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ml2mst | May 20, 2014
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I prefer TeamViewer (Non-commercial) and Skype. Neither are Open Source unfortunately, yet they do the job ;-)

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Dan Randow | May 20, 2014
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I will go with email as, like for most people at work, it is far and away the collaboration tool I use the most.

I will add however that, with the following declarations of bias, a web-integrated mailing list manager such as <a href="http://groupserver.org">GroupServer</a> can be used to mitigate email's main weakness which is that it is poor for many-to-many collaboration.

The declarations of bias are firstly that my company <a href="http://onlinegroups.net">OnlineGroups.net</a> are the authors of GroupServer and secondly that it is open source, towards which I have some bias.

It is my view that email continues to dominate online collaboration because it is so versatile. Everyone has an address and an inbox. All flavours talk to each other. For this reason it is fantastic for one-to-one and one-to-many communication.

Sadly, by itself email is poor for many-to-many conversations. There is no way to maintain a stable list of participants or otherwise manage privacy. There is no easy way to keep track of ongoing conversations let alone more than one at a time. And there is no canonical searchable archive.

Web-integrated mailing list managers mitigate these problems very well. The group has managed membership and privacy settings. The email header has a little extra metadata providing context that makes it easier to triage email without opening it. The web archive separates conversations by subject line making it easy to follow a conversations over years, or when there are several occurring at one time. And of course, with systems where you can post from the web, there is great flexibility as to how you participate.

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Himanshusethi | July 26, 2014
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Thanks for the information. Sadly, by itself email is poor for many-to-many conversations. There is no way to maintain a stable list of participants or otherwise manage privacy. There is no easy way to keep track of ongoing conversations let alone more than one at a time. And there is no canonical searchable archive.

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Benjamin | February 24, 2015
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I would also consider eXo Platform ( http://www.exoplatform.com ) , an Open Source Social Collaboration tool

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AdaptRM | May 24, 2015
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I use all the tools in the list plus our time tracking tool - http://www.adaptrm.com/

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