Moving Mountains: Distributed Leadership and Cyberformance

Collaboration And Distributive Leadership

The process of eight art educators collaborating was quite complex. Part of the challenge of developing our collaborative media projects was coordinating meeting times for eight people from seven different universities and two different time zones. Additionally, we had varying technological and performance experience and expertise. Nevertheless, part of the opportunity was the diversity in our ways of thinking, personal experiences, and backgrounds that informed the structure and content of the efforts. We contributed to conversations both synchronously and asynchronously. Additionally, we conducted much of the preparation for the performance and film at a distance, through email, and computer applications including Skype, Google Hangout, Google Docs, Livestream, Upstage, and Second Life (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Authors collaborating through Google Hangout

We explored the notion of distributed leadership as a form of collaboration to push the boundaries of proximity, ideation, and production processes. Though distributed leadership is a form of collaboration, not all collaborations use a distributed leadership model. Collaborations bring together the skills of several people, often with fixed roles and jobs.