Assembla was introduced to me a few months back from one of my brothers, and it’s an online workspace designed for software development. It has typical collaborative features like wiki pages, discussion threads, file-sharing, milestones and also version control features like Subversion, Git and Mercurial. I didn’t have much experience using similar workspaces, and decided to try it out for my CS1105 Computing and Society project.

Our project had some sort of development involved, considering that we were trying to create a game, and so I decided to introduce to it to my group mates. Our project submission was in stages over the course of the semester, which was sufficient time for me to experiment with this system. Furthermore, I figured that each of us had our own busy schedules to adhere to, and having an online workspace would allow us to commonly work on our project in our individual free time. This would not only save time spent on having meetings, but would grant everyone the freedom of contributing to the project at their own pace.

Somewhere down this line, my logic must have been flawed. I found myself updating and adding most of the information onto the wikis, encouraging ideas and discussion from my group mates but to no avail. Besides one member, no one else seemed enthusiastic about contributing anything, let alone working on the project at all. I don’t see myself as a leader, and didn’t want to push anyone to put in more effort. Thus I decided to give it time to see if the others would become more responsive.

This didn’t work either, and practically more than half the content on our supposed discussion pages were from me. I encouraged them further as I added more ideas hoping that some of my enthusiasm would rub off on the others, but this too seemed like a lost cause. We had a few meetings but these often ended up being unproductive sessions, with mostly talk and not so much any work being actually done. I wondered what the solution to accomplishing our project would be, considering that it was increasingly difficult to get things done. My own interest in the project waned over time.

Things began to pick up about a week back, and fortunately, we’re using the file-sharing feature to keep one another updated with the latest version of our project. With less than four days to go to the deadline, I wonder if the rest are actually worried about our project submission. I find myself caring less now about the state of the project, and in greater anticipation of the deadline to pass. To be honest, my own reflection of my experience using an online collaborative workspace would be deemed a failure, partly because there was hardly any collaborative aspect in that.

I hope all this didn’t pass off as a rant. I’m not attempting to undermine my group member’s efforts in this project, which I always believe are irreplaceable contributions. I guess they weren’t equally enthusiastic about working in this manner, and in a sense I didn’t really try to find out their individual working styles. It was a disappointing experience for me, but I’m definitely keen on trying it again.

Unfortunately, Assembla is now implementing a pricing scheme for its users, and so I probably won’t be using it again. I don’t use their version control systems after all. I’ve been checking out both Google Groups and Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace, which both look equally attractive. But I’ll leave that decision to next semester, which thankfully is another two months away.

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