Talking about the phases of collaborative film making, Kent Bye wrote in Building a Theory of Collaborative Sensemaking | Echo Chamber Project:
The ideal collaborative sensemaking system would allow people to add their own context through each of these phases in a way that is both easy to participate and easy to productively make sense of the user input in a cumulative fashion.
I imagine that there will be a web-based multimedia experience of the film that is able to can get smarter as time goes on and more people are interact with the material by adding their context and meaning to it — as well as produce remixes and contribute new source material back to the ecosystem.
So while the finished 90-minute documentary becomes a static product that is released and watched by a mass audience, there will also be a multimedia experience of the source material that will grow and evolve over time as users continue to interact and contribute their meaning to the material.
Two Questions Come Up at this Point:
* How am I planning on making sense of this process as it evolves?
* How am I going to coordinate these various phases and harness the chaos of the participation and collective wisdom?
I will certainly be learning a lot as real people start using the system, and I intend on doing some top-down leadership by expressing specific questions to look into, themes of sequences to cut together and trying to process as much of the incoming participation as possible.
It will be a very uncertain and chaotic process, but Wikipedia has shown that the anarchy can be productively harnessed if there is an agreed upon set of collaborative principles, a group of people with common intentions, and through enough open communication.