Reading Bob Stein on the thorny business of collaborative writing versus quality and authorship started me musing about Pick Me Up.

¬†Pick Me Up, described by one Demos researcher as “an entirely open source magazine”¬†, is (or was) a weekly email newsletter. Its content comprised (though wasn’t restricted to)

1. Things people need help with, eg “I need to know how to fix a camera to a dog”)
2. Things to do and places to go, eg “I’m putting on this Cuban night with jelly wrestling, it’s [here] at [this time]”
3. Stories of things people had done, usually loaded on the website. Here’s one of my favourites.

What made Pick Me Up so interesting as an experiment not just in collaborative writing but in the social structures within which such writing can take place was a) how the content was generated, and b) how it was edited.

The content was a mixture of the editor emailing everyone they knew, and combining that with whatever had been mailed in by readers that week. As much of the readership was relatively culturally-active London twentysomethings, the¬†resulting tone was a strange mixture of ‘one degree of separation’¬†and total randomness.

¬†The editor wasn’t consistent, either. Anyone who wanted¬†to could have a go editing. All you had to do was get in touch, you’d get put on the mailing list, then you’d be paired up with someone who’d done it before to edit an issue. Once you’d got your hand in, by general consensus, you might be paired up with a rookie editor. And so on. It went together in a wiki, and was emailed out to the subscriber list.

Pick Me Up got about as close to being open source as a virtual magazine can be whilst maintaining some kind of editorial standard. However, there were problems. You notice I said ‘Pick Me Up was…’. There hasn’t been an issue of Pick Me Up since July. Why?

Firstly, there were only about five people who were trusted to polish off and send out the mail. So though in theory it was open source, in practice it was rigorously filtered. That led to problems with the supposedly open-source editor community ultimately not feeling empowered enough; then, predictably, when those five people got tired of it and moved on to other projects, the production began to struggle.¬†The other problem was¬†sketchy technology. Though it went together online, there were so many logins to learn that to be conversant with all the bits of Pick Me Up’s admin automatically made you one of that ‘elite’ group of five. And even though, in reality, that group of five was open to new members, the process of ‘proving your worth’ was arduous and experienced by some as ‘cliquey’.

So was this emergent oligarchy-of-collaboration a good or bad thing? Pick Me Up’s structure fell a long way short of an ethos of radical openness, but¬†ensured a standard of writing and consistent house style rarely seen in a collaborative exercise. And yet the tight control of this small group of people choked it to death in the end. But then again, this was after just short of 100 issues over two years, and an entirely word-of-mouth-generated readership of over 3500, all achieved for the princely sum of no money. And I know there are people who, reading this, will tell me that it’s not dead but, like the Pythons’ Norwegian Blue, just sleeping.

So in short, I don’t know whether radically-open collaboration works. I don’t know whether, as Bob Stein says, ‘we need edges’. I think without any, user-generated writing will be at best of questionable quality.

So how do you create the right kind of edges? Pick Me Up was, ultimately, a network of friends. Any editorial control, correction or suggestions for improvement happened within a sense of amicable cooperation rather than criticism or competition.¬†Perhaps its mistake was in not recognising the point where control might have been broadened - widening the inner circle of friends - but perhaps without that circle of friends it just wouldn’t have happened. But in the process of learning to collaborate, whatever the failings, I made many friends - including most of the people I’m now in business with. And in that sense, Pick Me Up taught me that collaboration isn’t something that happens in a Google Docs file: it’s something that happens between real people, with real aims and real feelings. Google Docs is only a pleasant way to work if you’re in the same room as your collaborators.

So while I agree with Bob Stein that there are times when authorship is important, I also believe that what we need is not ways of restricting collaboration in the interests of distinctive prose, but better tools for collaborating. And I don’t mean a gamma version of Google Docs, but emotional tools: ways of consolidating and nourishing the kind of friendships that can sit behind a multiple-editor interface and smooth the way for distinctive, good quality prose - with more than one author.