Todd Barr

The difference between collaboration and clobberation

Seal colony sez: you can't force true collaboration, yo!

Picture this: You are sitting in a meeting, and someone from another department is beating you up because you won’t go along their vision. They’ve never asked your for your opinion, they didn’t involve you in their process, and now you are sitting there getting railed because you are not sure what they are pushing is the right thing to do.

And then it comes. You get accused of not being collaborative.

You were just a victim of clobberation.

Clobberation [klob-uh-reh-shun] (n)

The art of beating someone into submission under the guise of collaboration.

I first heard this term from my friend Todd Barr a few years ago, and it’s stuck with me ever since.

Especially for us open source folks, who think of true collaboration as something almost holy, getting clobberated is really, really painful. And the hard part? It is sometimes difficult to articulate how someone clobberated you, but you almost always know it when you feel it. You feel anxious, cheated, even guilty.

So what’s an honest collaborator to do?

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