Supergroups

[taj]

I was looking at Evoke live stream and was astounded by http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31658
Its a music disk created by the combined talents at Bitfellas bulletin board. It is *awesome* and if it doesnt win the wild competition, I'll eat my PC. Both of them. In fish heads.

Anyway, to the point. I wonder if this is a one off or an indication of things to come. Many sceners are in many groups, much more than ten years ago and there is a lot of cross-polination of ideas, particularly this is true of musicians and artists. It seems a logical extension for bulletin boards where dozens of groups can gather to exist eg here, bitfellas.

Sooner or later someone will offer to co-ordinate a project and combine the talents. We have even talked about it here in the past. A sort of supergroup exists where lots of people can contribute to one product. Of course it takes management which is anathema to the scene but at least "pack" products would be possible (artpacks, musicdisks, demopacks).

I guess its not the last we'll see of bitfellas as their musicdisk is going to be very influential. The question is, will more come of this? Is it possible to co-ordinate a demo this way? Could bitfellas release a crushingly good demo or does that require more individual visiion?

Anyway, thinking out loud.

Chris

[Shockwave]

Large collaberations are difficult. It would take a huge amount of organisation to make a massive demo out of a large community and for this reason I think that you can get to the point where you get diminishing returns. Too many people to pull in different directions unless each person is assigned a task at the beginning and sticks to it religiously and meets deadlines.


It sounds a lot like work to me.

[Jim]

It is, and it isn't.  There are some great collaboration tools out there, for instance Subversion can manage all the shared code, and there are others that work with binary files/pictures/music.  Also bugtracking tools like bugzilla and wikis are awsome for working together.  I saw a project management Gantt chart tool the other day.

But as you say, it's seriously hard to get people pulling in the same direction.  That needs a strong plan - a storyboard that will take the project from cradle to grave - and a strong planner to keep things on track.  Everyone needs to be motivated too.  Usually that takes money or fame.  You also have to deal with people popping in and out of the project, due to some commitment or other.

Somehow huge projects do get made though - I've worked on many

Jim

[benny!]

First. I think the idea of a Supergroup is straight forward and totally cool.
It's somehow related to gridded scene potentials or something like that
and in the era of forums / internet a logical consequence in my eyes.

The "interesting" (or: challenging) part here is of course the management and co-
ordination. But as those projects are already known in industry there are several
frameworks / tools / methods that can help you ( Jim already mentioned some ).

So, if someone is willing to spend time into a solid project management - such a
supergroup could create amazing stuff. To begin with it might be a good idea to
start with a small project (i.e. kind of protoype) to see where the trapfalls are...

Hmm ... more thoughts please ...