Asynchronous Collaboration

Many creators collaborate across geography and time zones, which creates incredible new partnerships and knowledge sharing speaking directly to the culture and mission of OnBoardXR. However, it can be difficult to stay organized. Below are some best practices we recommend.

Shared “Living” Document

We typically recommend creators use a cloud-based document, like Google Docs, to create a central archive for their project(s). This “living document” allows all team members the ability to access and update the latest information for the project, event and deliverables, in real-time (that can often be lost or overlooked in long threads of text or email). Many of these documents also have the ability to “view history” so you can efficiently monitor the latest changes or additions.

Universal Time

Time zones and seasonal changes can create many headaches when organizing deadlines or meet ups. The first and simplest method is to choose one time zone as a the “universal time” for the project. Creators have also used UTC or Coordinated Universal Time as a standard for everyone.

A handy trick in Discord is to use Epoch Time, which will auto-matically generate the local time on each user’s device. This requires using a Epoch Unix Time Generator to retrieve a ten digit code represeting the month, day, year, hour and minute. This code can be pasted in Discord using by typing <t:1234567890>. Each user will see the time/date according to their device’s local time zone.

Supporting Media

It can be difficult to get any group of people to agree or imagine the same thing. This is even harder when creators are not directly interacting. While our creators work with hightly imaginative and cutting edge ideas, there is often existing media to help support or suggest components of the intended outcome of an asset or idea (images, GIFs, video, articles, etc). Sourcing this media can feel tedious, however this work can often be recycled into compelling documentation and attribution for the final project.