Alex Selkirk has been using Chandler for the past year. For 5 months or so, he’s been using it to collaborate with a colleague. Here is his account of one of the ways they use Chandler to work together.

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I started a not-for-profit last year, The Common Datatrust Foundation. Our organization is new and small. I work with one other person, Grace, two days a week.

Our processes are still rather fluid. However, we are far along enough that 6-7 areas of activity have emerged:

• General (meaning, stuff that defies categorization!)
• Community
• Board
• Blog
• Governance
• Contacts
• Funding

Each of these corresponds to a collection in Chandler. We share all 7 collections.

One of the better worked out routines we’ve established is around collecting, and developing ideas for our blog. We have 2 blog collections. 1 for brainstorming. It has close to 200 ideas. We don’t hold back. Anything and everything that might be blog-worthy gets thrown in there. If it’s an article, I usually paste the link to the article plus the content of the article right into the item. It’s not always apparent what the “point” of the blog post might be so I usually spend a couple of minutes and try to articulate what it was I found interesting about the article.

Developing an idea in “Reading List”:

Ideas that are either time-sensitive or have somehow gelled into a clear point are promoted to a second, more closely guarded “Blog Queue” collection. “Blog Queue” currently has 34 items, 29 of which are DONE with 2 in NOW and 2 in LATER.

Finalizing our blog categories in “Blog Queue”:

Basically, these are the posts we’re actually going to publish. We work through many, many drafts for these posts in Chandler. Grace will usually draft a first pass together based on whatever exchange we’d already had when the post was still just an idea in the “Reading List” collection. As we work through iterations, we leave comments for each other either in-line or at the top, above the draft itself. Chandler doesn’t yet “officially” support comments on items so we have made up our own nomenclature to keep track of what said what. This works well enough for 2-3 people but I can see it getting out of hand if more people were to pitch in. (Although, keeping commentary straight would be the least of our problems if 5 people were trying to write 1 blog post together!) For particularly difficult posts, we might go through 5-6 drafts before we get it “right enough”, at which point, we move the post into Wordpress for formatting and final review. However, we’ll continue to leave comments about the post in Chandler.

If we didn’t have Chandler, I’m not sure how we would do this. Email isn’t great for managing lists of things together. As for working through drafts together, whenever we’ve moved our discussions over to email and Word docs, we run into problems trying to keeping track of different versions. Chandler on the other hand, forces us to stay up-to-date and summarize where we’re at with any given post. When a blog post item starts to get too messy, one of us will go in and clean it up, delete what’s no longer important, summarize key points and pull together a coherent latest draft. If the text editing capabilities were a bit more robust (just the ability to tab would be huge), we wouldn’t feel the need to move over to email at all.

This is just one of the ways Grace and I work together using Chandler. As it’s turns out, we’ve been doing most of our work in Chandler and only use email to communicate news and information that doesn’t require follow up. Who would’ve thought!

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Full Disclosure: Chandler Product Designer, Mimi Yin is on the board of The Common Datatrust Foundation and is also married to Alex Selkirk.