Barriers and pathways to successful collaboration

Effective collaboration is essential to virtually every human endeavor, since there are relatively few significant tasks that can be accomplished by a single individual. Successful collaboration efforts can be ascribed to a shared vision, strong and charismatic leadership, and the ability to overcome technical, organizational, and personal obstacles to achieving the project's objective(s). At the same time, there are many barriers that can make these efforts fail. While these barriers can't always be overcome, the chances of success are greatly improved if people are aware of the various challenges and take steps to anticipate them in advance. This talk addresses these issues, and draws examples from the FLOSS community, from startups, and from other disciplines.