- Collaborative brainstorming allowed for diverse contributions from all team members
- Individual contributions were more visible
- Bottom-up approach allowed participants to see their projects from a different perspective
- Anonymity of the process allowed participants to enter contributions rapidly without feeling self-conscious
- Participants could finish their tasks and move on without having to wait for their group members, maximizing productivity and minimizing need for coordination
- Collocated setting allowed for group members to coordinate outside of the tool and stimulate discussion among themselves to generate new ideas, overcoming common problems associated with remote collaborative writing


New York University

A system of collaborative writing that breaks the process down into three types of microtasks: 

- 1) Idea Generation: wherein collaborators brainstorm and collect raw ideas to be included in the final report;

- 2) Labelling: wherein these ideas are labelled and organized into clusters based on relatedness;

- 3) Writing: wherein related ideas collected under the same label are merged into a single coherent paragraph.


MicroWriter

Teevan, J., Iqbal, S. T., & Von Veh, C. (2016, May). Supporting Collaborative Writing with Microtasks. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2657-2668).

Supporting Collaborative Writing with Microtasks

Benefits of the MicroWriter System

- Bottom-up approach made it harder to see the big picture
- Having to split attention between screen and face-to-face communication made the process frustrating
- Although participants were able to produce coherent paragraphs using collaboratively-generated ideas, coherency between different paragraphs in the paper needed improvement
- Did not fully eliminate the need for external coordination; tasks themselves did not provide enough context for individuals to complete them independently
- Responses from groups with fewer people were more positive, meaning that larger groups still encounter more coordination issues using this system of writing

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