When Robin encouraged us to simply discuss amongst ourselves which ideas we wanted to pursue for our film project, I was quite taken aback and a little bit nervous. I wasn’t sure where to begin with discussing ideas with the people around me. The first five minutes or so was dedicated to saying things like “yeah I don’t know, there are a lot of ideas I like” and variations of that. After a little while though, we started to open up a bit more and the discussion started to get somewhere.

I found that it was best to be up front with each other about whether or not we would be interested in working on a particular idea. Amongst the people I spoke to, there were several ideas (my own included) that were garnering a fair bit of interest. For that reason, it became necessary to do a kind of process of elimination where we went through each of the ideas and decided whether or not they would be practical/achievable within our means. I found this to be a very healthy process, because everyone seemed to agree a few of the ideas, despite being highly interesting, were simply not as achievable as others. The process was logical and painless, which was a relief considering the potential for people getting offended in the situation. Our table of six narrowed down the ideas from 6 to 2, landing on my own idea and Elaine’s idea as the two we would work on.

This process of idea selection and group allocation definitely felt like the first stages of collaboration. We came to a solution to a problem as a group, and in the end everyone was happy. I think the reason for the success of the discussion was the willingness of the group to be upfront about their inclinations and opinions on certain ideas. I think that this is something to remember for future collaborative situations.