- 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

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

- 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


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