When a Collaborator Feels like a 'Collaborator'

David Theo Goldberg and I first started working on HASTAC together in 2002. By 2003, we had invited several like-minded colleagues to join us and we started meeting twice a year, developing this ever-evolving virtual institution that, somehow, ended up being called HASTAC. We wrote grants together, took turns offering workshops and conferences, wrote articles, and, for five years now, have managed about as careful a balance of contribution (sharing the d**n work!) as one can ever imagine. Sometimes, I am at a really ragged and busy place, and he takes the lead. Sometimes the opposite. We have teams of colleagues at our institutions who now are doing the same together, working bicoastally on a massive project, editing one another, sending suggestions, taking turns. It's one of the most amazing and fruitful team efforts I've ever seen.

So even with all of that, yesterday I happened to see something that was a collaboration between us attributed just to me. The posting was a mistake, the attribution to me in accidental, no harm intended. It felt awful. There was my smiley little picture peering out over some text that David and I had crafted together. In fact, if memory serves, the exact part of our "Future of Learning Institutions" piece that was quoted may have come, at least in first draft, off of his desktop. (This is harder and harder to tell now; he is trained as a philosopher, I'm trained in literature, but we've been working together so long that the rhetorical and intellectual blending now works in both directions and I find that sometimes I will write "more like David" when I am writing with him, and I suspect he does the same sometimes. It is fascinating.) But seeing that little happy face above something that was co-written by both of us made me cringe. Metaphysically cringe. Actually cringe. Yuck. My reaction was so strong, in fact, that I've been thinking about it, about why it feels so crummy. And so I'm blogging about it.

Collaboration is a fine art of working together, sharing, but also giving credit to the act of working together: public acknowledgment, public respect. It only works when all the parties collaborating feel as if there is a greater good that comes from their working together. That greater good can be efficiency but rarely is. We can all slap something together on our own faster than we can work with someone else. If I had to do this blog collaboratively, it wouldn't happen. Collaboration is a commitment, it takes time. But one collaborates because, typically, the product is better , the ideas more complex, the pool of knowledge wider and deeper, as a result. Take a piece of writing, and it becomes something else when it is seen by other eyes, when it is responded to, when it is worked upon, developed, challenged, critiqued. And sometimes there is no first draft/second draft, but a real thinking outloud (so to speak) together, where ideas form in the synapses of speech, the interstices of writing. That process is exhilirating, to see ideas emerge as something more dynamic and rich and full. It is teaching-learning, learning-teaching, among equals.

The public part is essential because the ideology of U.S.-style capitalist individualism is definitely about the hero, the Great (Wo)Man, the singular. And the post-Romantic stereotype of the writer is solitary. Add to that the stereotype of teaching-learning as one of the superior filling the inferior vessel. Collaboration works against all of that. And so constant equality, public credit-sharing and credit-giving, is essential or the old stereotypes and ideologies slip in.

That is why I felt so terrible seeing something co-written presented as if it were by ME. Ironically, the whole project is about collaboration and is part of an experiment in collaborative writing, with feedback being solicited on a collaborative online writing tool and in forums David and I have held on both coasts and in the Midwest. Anyone can contribute to the experiment and all will be given credit in a final publication (online and paper) that will include a rollcall of all contributors and, for work we actually quote, proper attribution and citation. More, we are proposing new styles of teaching-learning that are themselves collaborative, and we see the future of learning institutions as about learning as one teaches, teaching as one learns. You can contribute your ideas at http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/about/.

A collaborator is someone with whom one works on a project, acknowledged and fully credited. There's another definition of "collaborator" which is selling out, working on behalf of the enemy, contributing to the public evil, not to the public good. A betrayer. That feeling was immediate and intense when I saw my smiley face above work David and I did together. And we immediately asked that this completely inadvertent mistake be corrected because balance and looking out for one another is also part of the success of a long-time sharing in an intellectual goal. But once this mistake is corrected, I'll be happy it happened---because it launched me into an introspective mood that made me think about why public credit and public definition of a successful collaboration is so important a part of its nature, so crucial to its success.