On Collaboration #4: David Rogerson

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 4, and a former client of ours, David Rogerson

Who are you and what do you do?

I am David Rogerson - Senior Digital Producer at ico Design Partners - a digital, brand and design agency based in London that works with clients from the arts, property, leisure, interior design and museum sector.

I was formerly Digital Manager at Sound and Music - the UK's largest non-venue RFO. And worked on projects from collaborative software development for special needs education, major websites, festivals and content.

Why do you collaborate?

Doing it with others is fun.

Which collaboration tools do you like and why?

I tend to be taken in by new fangled tools - especially digital applications - but aside from Google Docs there are few that I have stuck with.

Nothing helps collaboration more than good, speedy communication - and sitting in the same room helps. Coffee breaks are good too. I like the Agile approach of being surrounded by your thought process (stuck to walls, on posters and index cards).

I find it hard to describe my thoughts without a pen and a bit of paper and I find standing up around a board gets any project moving.

When does collaboration tend to work best?

Perversely, collaboration works best when people are able to get on and do their own thing without too much back-and-fourth with the group. This is achieved by clear aims, vision and decision making process.

These parameters need to be set in the beginning and there needs to be regular opportunities to critique, problem solve and learn throughout the process.

Finally, trust is important. You don't have to like the people you're collaborating with but you definitely need to trust them.

What framework or rules do you need for successful collaboration?

There is no one framework I have found that works.

I do think Agile methodologies point to ways of collaborating efficiently and creatively but they come with there own limitations and isn't right for many contexts.

I do believe in starting with the two questions who and why before anything else. If you can't get beyond this - it will never work.

What and how come later.

Briefly describe a collaboration you admire and tell us why you think it works.

I was going to choose Wikipedia but Shirkey's covered that one much better than I could ever dream of. Instead I will go with freeform, US radio station WFMU.

It is a donation-funded radio station (no ads) that is run by volunteers mostly. They are dedicated to playing whatever the hell they want. They are irreverent, funny, experimental and hugely prolific. They stream 5 separate stations continuously online, they hold events, live sessions, have a massive blog, iphone apps etc etc.

They do this because lots of people dedicate a lot of their own time to something they believe in. It has clear leadership but is very much 'owned' by the DJs and public who listen to it. They have exposed me to more new music than any and all the music orgs and radio stations in the UK combined.

When has collaboration gone wrong for you?

Collaboration fails to some degree every time. It is how much it fails and how much it effects the results that matters.

On a grand scale, I was involved in the merger of four (at some points more) organisations. It involved the collaboration of staff from all these orgs to try and shape the new organisation.

It went wrong in many ways

1. No one knew (or could agree) what they were trying to achieve and how they knew when they go there
2. There was no trust - you were collaborating with people whose jobs depended on seeing through their own position
3. Lack of ability - people weren't skilled or experienced in collaboration and so didn't know 'the rules'
4. There were no rules
5. There were lots of rules, but most didn't know what they were
6. People were asked to be objective about subjective things
7. Pretending things were non-hierarchical but undermining it with hierarchy
8. No one was seen as being in charge
9. The decision making process was not clear

All radio is audio but not all audio is radio

Radio is never far from our minds here; we're all avid listeners, and on the professional front, Justin, Matthew and myself are all alumni of the BBC's Radio and Music Division. But this last week, radio has been especially present in our thinking; we've been meeting with the good folks from New York Public Radio (the people behind classical station WQXR), helping a radio-based consortium shape up their response to a successful Technology Strategy Board CADI bid and, perhaps more tangentially, trying to to get our heads around the implications of the launch of the UK Radio Player.

In truth, that's all pretty disparate, but nonetheless, a few themes have been emerging for us, and over the months I suspect we'll be returning to several of them here. But here's one which keeps coming up and which strikes a particular chord with me: All radio is audio but not all audio is radio.

The death of radio has been a New Media meme for some years now; indeed, the very phrase was the title for one of former BBC Radio & Music Interactive Controller Simon Nelson's more barnstorming presentations. And there is good reason to fear for it in the long run. As the father of a 20 year old and two teens, I see little evidence of young people picking up the radio habit.

But what I really don't see as a threat to radio's survival is the rise of online streaming music services: Last, SoundCloud, Rhapsody, Spotify and on and on. These services - which I've written about in depth elsewhere at various stages of their development - are surely a threat to traditional record listening (whatever the hell that is), but not to radio. I have no empirical evidence for this (and I do accept that the presence of streaming music sites and apps contributes to an increasingly diffuse and a tad overwhelming media consumption environment which in turn is one of the things "doing in" radio), but it seems self-evident to me that these new services are qualititively different to radio: not necessarily either better or worse, but definitely different. 

We're all familiar with the term celestial jukebox; the reality is of course some way off (although I am streaming an album of Korean classical music to my Spotify iPhone app as I write this on the train from Brighton to London, so we're a lot closer than I thought we'd be by 2011, to be honest). But we don't turn to radio - be it live, on-demand or otherwise - as a jukebox. I'm not going to list all the things for which we do turn to radio, but company it strikes me, would be chief among them (and a particularly intimate kind of company at that).

So here's a thing. I've only just really come across what UK music streaming service We7 are doing. Plainly they've decided that at this juncture, going up against Spotify and Last is a mug's game, and I think that's smart. Instead they're proposing an interesting amalgam of streaming jukebox and linear radio, with such content as news inserts and traffic announcements breaking up streams, essentially "faking" radio. Indeed, a consortium including We7 and the media production company for whom I used to be Head of Interactive, Somethin' Else, have just been awarded a TSB grant for R&D into taking this to the next level.

Whether We7 will be successful in this remains to be seen - and judging from their current offering, I'm way too far from their target demographic to really judge it. But it does strike me as a very clear statement that radio is something distinctive from streamed music - and that at least one UK company thinks there's a potential future audience for it.

In future posts I'll be looking at such radio-related issues as the rise of lossless, the value of metadata, the role of gatekeepers and why lean forward vs sit back doesn't quite hack it for a secondary medium.