This week I braved the thicket of plugins for WordPress, and built a really simple and basic widget for displaying a Zotero feed. I was amazed and humbled by the retweeting that happened after @zotero tweeted about it. Many thanks to all of you.

But -- no surprise -- bugs and missing features were quickly discovered, first by Mark Sample (aka @samplereality), which he left in some comments on my post. Drat! And I was hoping I could call it done! But, since I now knew that people were actually, you know, using the plugin, I had a responsibility to work on it. It was one of the first times that I really felt like I was giving back in the open source way, which I gotta say is a great feeling.

This led to a series of exchanges between me and Mark on Twitter and in the comments to the post -- Twitter and blogs living together in harmony. Naturally, I had my share of dumb moments while trying to debug.

But it finally came together

I direct messaged back.

And I was kinda struck by what Mark said in response:

Mini-collaboration? A great term for what had just happened, and I think its simplicity conceals something really profound. I had one quick little need to fill (a widget for a Zotero feed), and by sharing it out suddenly I was in contact with a complete stranger who also had the same need. And with just a few tweets and blog comments, the product was greatly improved. Chances are pretty slim that we'll meet at a conference or something, and aside from interacting on Twitter and our blogs periodically I doubt that there will be much contact between us.

But that's the "mini" in mini-collaboration. I think that often when people say "We should collaborate on this", I tend to imagine an extended period of time -- weeks, months, semesters, years even. But this shows that a really useful and productive collaboration can exist in the space of only a few hours, and between total strangers.

What makes that work? Willingness to share out a product that might very well not work. Being friendly by retweeting something that you think is interesting. Being brave by trying out a new piece of software. Being friendly by commenting about bugs, and options you'd like to see in it. And using the tools that are out there (blogs, twitter, etc.) to say, "Hey, if we can improve this, everyone will benefit."

Finally, it's also an example of how I think digital humanities will work and develop: collaborations -- on whatever scale -- between humanists at different positions on the "I am a coder" -------- "I ain't a coder" spectrum.