A new team of authors/editors with a fresh set of eyes, critically dissected our initial conventions about collaboration. The main surgical intervention will happen now, by Friday night we should stitch it all together.

Second Collaborative Futures team starting the book sprint with a Skype session with more of the original authors

It’s scary to see your labor of love on the surgeon’s table. That’s a bit of how it feels now after the first day of the June 2010 Collaborative Futures book sprint.

Kanarinka, Astra Taylor & Verina Gfader have joined Michael Mandiberg and myself at Eyebeam and Adam Hyde, Alan Toner & Mike Linksvayer (via Skype). The new authors having read the book, set to examine the convictions and ideological frameworks that have defined the book written in January. Like in the previous sprint, we expressed ideas and themes through sticky notes and then clustered them together.

These are the titles of the clusters we came up with:

• The imaginary author
• The imaginary reader
• Change fetishism
• Marketing the ideology
• Value / labor / capital
• Scope of (the term) “collaboration”
• Meritocracy
• Context & location
• Aesthetics
• Gender
• The tyranny of structurelessness
• Invitation
• Evaluation standards
• Antagonism
• Friendship
• Book as medium
• Critical glossary
• More images, diagrams…

You can actually see all the stickies on my Flickr set.

There was an interesting discussion about inconsistency in the book. While inconsistency makes the reading slightly harder, it can also be framed as information that exposes diverging views. One of the challenges we face is making the reading flow and not be broken by inconsistency, but at the same time leave room for multiplicity and conflicting views.

More updates will follow, got to rush and start the second day…