On Collaboration #5: Debbie Forster, Apps for Good

Ahead of our next Group Think event in May (co-produced with the Barbican Centre), on the subject of collaboration, we've been talking to some of our friends, colleagues and clients about how collaboration fits into their lives and work. So we sent out a little questionnaire and, over the next few weeks, we'll be publishing what everyone told us.

Here's number five in the series, Debbie Forster of Apps for Good.

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Debbie Forster, COO of CDI Europe, and my work focusses on our Apps for Good programme.

Why do you collaborate?

The best kind starts with people or groups that share a core purpose or aim, once that's in place you are better placed overcome the various challenges that collaboration inevitably throws up. I'm from education, and I find that wanting to make a difference for young people is a powerful driver that can create some great opportunities for collaboration. But then you need to build in personal relationships AND a specific project or piece of work or the collaboration quickly becomes just talking shop and people drift away.

Which collaboration tools do you like and why?

I've used some pretty basic/free tools like Google docs, Skype etc, which work fine once the face to face has taken place; without that, the work tends to stay superficial. I think tools which allow voice interaction rather than just sharing of docs/screens, etc is important as effective collaboration needs regular synchronous verbal interaction. You definitely don't need to always be face to face but you need to find ways to genuinely interact and discuss to really make collaboration work.

When does collaboration tend to work best?

When there are very different skills, abilities, background and experience balanced by common aims and goals, complementary styles. And if you can group people who genuinely like and respect each other's styles & goals, great things can happen.

I've also found that it works best when there is the agreed goal and plan but regular discussions to explore other opportunities and needs. The old "there's no such thing as a stupid question" is important in collaboration.

What framework or rules do you need for successful collaboration?

This will vary dramatically from case to case, but for me the crucial thing is to start with real clarity on both sides on what they need to get from it to be a success, any "no go" areas and maximum/minimum levels of commitment that can be expected on both sides. I'm also keen to understand ahead of the game what should happen should problems/disasters arise and a commitment to transparency. Understanding how you'll tackle problems helps avert the risk of them turning into disasters.

When has collaboration gone wrong for you?

I can think of some past disasters when collaboration was set up for its own sake, to "tick a box" and really there wasn't a shared goal... or even a real purpose for it - wasting everyone's time and good will.

Also seen problems where potential problems like conflicts of interest, inherent competition weren't honestly discussed and wrecked plans part way through.

New ways to come together round the iPad for a good old sing along

We often work with organisations that are looking for interesting ways to collaborate with their audiences. Right now I'm thinking a lot about the Dean Rodney Singers project for the Olympics and the digital strategy work for the Southbank Centre.  So that means I'm always on the look out for new ideas, software and trends, wherever they pop up in my life.

Over the last few days I've been looking at a couple of new iPad apps that are making my family laugh a lot and really pushing into some new territory for social music making: MadPad HD from Smule and VidRhythm from Harmonix (of Rock Band legend).

Both developers are big players in this area. They both have an instinct for how to make the act of music creation and play as wide open and available to as many people as possible. These are not music-tech nerd apps, although music-tech nerds like myself will still have plenty to muck about with.

The first thing to note is that they are approaching the same set of creative challenges in rather different ways. They both deal with the challenge of how to combine the act of videoing and sampling in a way that creates usable results. They both deal with the challenge of how to create output that can be shared and the ramifications of the resulting community. They both deal with a question that I love, which is how to bring people together into a shared creative experience - quite often with participants doing completely different things - but that somehow feels open, exciting and personal.

MadPad is all about creating a little instrument built up from a set of 12 video/musical samples. I have just spent 5 minutes making a racket in my office, grasping my iPad in my left hand and precariously trying to aim the camera lens at my right hand as I bashed various things. Although tricky, I can see how it could be done better - and if anything it encourages the use of a friend. After making 12 short sounds you can play them back by tapping them or dragging them with two fingers to play them 'decks' style. After a bit of playing and beat-making I realised there was a bit more going on in the app.

When you are recording your set of vid/samples you quickly come to realise there is some other functionality there. You can import other people's samples into your own set - you can effectively make your instrument or sound bank out of other people's sounds. Of course this means you can also do the opposite: share your own creations with others for their use.

This got me thinking about what kind of sound or video might end up being used in other people's sound banks and I suspect others are thinking just the same thing right now. I thought I'd check to see how the moderation and community safety features work and it does seem that at present there is a very tight filter on. Everything goes through to the developers, Smule, and they decide whether it is fit for public consumption - a model we all know scales very badly. Right now you can browse Smule's own creations and a set of 20 public creations that they refer to as 'Community Featured' - otherwise known as the ones Smule like.

But wait: it turns out that if you record yourself doing a performance, you can upload that directly to your YouTube account. So although you can't easily share the building blocks of your creation you can share a video of you playing your sounds. Here is my video of me playing sounds captured in my office.



Smule clearly relish the opportunity to bring music players together and many of their apps have this at the core of the experience. I expect that they are playing a suck-and-see strategy here to learn just how open this community behaves and to try and anticipate how much freedom is possible before it starts to offend itself and ultimately lose the trust of its participants.

Harmonix have come up with a very different way of bringing together sound and image. VidRhythm is all about delighting its users with the surprise of the results, rather than the playfulness of the process. When opening it, you are invited to choose a song followed by a video style. This is the point where the camera and mic combo become your tools as the app asks you to create a set of video samples, one at a time, six in all. In each case it asks you to make a sound like "BOM!" or "TSK!" or maybe sing a particular pitch.

This is all very different to the open-ness of MadPad but somehow the intrigue of it all keeps you going and the task seems acceptably straightforward. After this short task you get to press the big button to watch your new video. This is when it all makes sense - all your samples are now played back with the video in a pre-sequenced pattern. The sounds are pitch-shifted and the video sprayed all over the screen to achieve something strange, usually funny and quite compelling. Created videos can then be shared on YouTube in much the same way as with MadPad.

This is me and my three year old working on some deep a capella dubstep action.



It is clearly the immediacy of the experience that makes Vid-Rhythmic tick. And that's the thing: there is always this tension between open and free play of something like MadPad with a tool that could easily lead nowhere, or worse to a sense of instant dissatisfaction, and the closed play of Vid-Rhythmic which leads to a short and thrilling wow factor but often with nowhere else to go. Harmonix are already clearly aware of this and have hinted that are working on a way for people to supply the song templates as well as the actual sounds, but be in no doubt this is a tricky thing to pull off.

I have to say that I can feel the exciting development possibilities of MadPad. I sense that it might give rise to some very interesting collaborative approaches to making sound and music stuff. Although it feels like Smule are making baby steps toward an open collaboration platform the foundations are definitely there. I will certainly have it in my mind, both as a model and as useful content platform when I'm working with clients looking to collaborate with their audience.