The other one was going okay too- just moving along a little slowly with planning and decision making, and there was also one fellow included for a while that had a very different philosophy and expectations for the project vs. the whole rest of the group, so we butted heads with him a lot on practically every point until his departure, which slowed things down considerably... I'm still look forward to hopefully seeing the project through to completion once everyone regains their bearings a little, though!
Like I said a while ago, usually I don't barge in when another artist starts another weekly "Let's shit on writers!" topic (even the latest ones which did significantly more damage than usual) but since I was mentioned here I'll just add my perspective from another side of the barricade.
First of all, that particular collaboration was proposed as a free open collab where anyone could join, propose ideas and work on anything they like so it was not a proprietary project aimed at making any particular comic.
Multiple people proposed multiple ideas and eventually one of those ideas was chosen by a majority of participants. Not the best idea with some serious logical flaws but it was more or less suitable for a test run so people gradually started working on it.
My philosophy regarding this, my own and any other complex project is very simple: if you want to make it through – proper organizing and stable working pace are essential.
- Any complex work that involves a team require a leader who will keep the whole project together, organize people, aggregate input, issue working tasks and most importantly, make decisions and say the final word if the rest of the team is unable to find a consensus.
- Another thing that is absolutely essential during such kind of work is stable and regular communication between participants because every team member must be aware of what others are doing at any given moment and if someone cannot do its part for whatever reason, the rest of the team must be able to quickly reassign the workload. And if you said that you'll do something - do it! It doesn't matter paid or not, for fun or by contract, either keep your word or at least inform others that you are unable to fulfill your task.
Contrary to my efforts the rest of the team decided to do the exact opposite – nobody was in charge of anything, nobody made any solid decisions, haphazard chewing of ideas, sporadic communication with people just randomly popping in and out at random intervals forcing others to wait for god knows what, random drafts instead of steady storyboarding, you name it. Seriously, it was an exemplar case of how NOT to do an open collaboration or, to be completely honest, any kind of teamwork.
Seeing all the above I have tried maintaining at least a semblance of organized working environment but my efforts were met with passive-aggressive pressure (which I ignored) so I've decided not to waste my time on active participation and took a backseat as a spectator while giving some minor feedback (mostly to keep any kind of activity going) and waiting for an opportunity to become useful. As a result Rhonder and his buddies decided to get rid of me despite the fact that it was not their personal project (it was proposed by someone else as an open collab) and I had as much right to participate as they were but after a while they somehow managed to throw me out without any explanations. Frankly speaking, I have to thank them for making that decision for me because it allowed me to focus all my efforts on my current project and successfully finish it several months later.
So, after the main problem (I mean myself of course, not a disastrous working pipeline) was finally dealt with, have they managed to finish their small and rather simple project? Well, despite being thrown out I still have access to some of their working repositories and by the looks of it I can tell that their slow-going train-wreck of a project came to a grinding halt approximately at the same time as I have left it. Perhaps they have abandoned old repositories and created new ones after that but something tells me that pool of half-digested ideas and a few random drafts is as far as they ever went. Dixi.
