Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets To the Breaking Point (medium.com) 31
In the past decade, Google's suite of collaborative tools has steadily gained prominence in social movements and other forms of widespread collaboration. From a report: It was used to organize Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011, disseminate resources for protesting after the U.S. election in 2016, and assemble response to the California wildfires in 2017. During 2020, these tools have earned a reputation as "the social media of the resistance;" they have played a key role in the formation of pandemic mutual aid groups, the organization of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the aggregation of allegations in the gaming industry's #MeToo reckoning. But when these resources go viral, they often encounter limitations of G Suite. "Whenever you loaded the page, it would just fail half the time," says Edward Saperia, who initially used Google Docs to build Coronavirus Tech Handbook, a crowdsourced directory of tools, services, and resources for Covid-19 response.
The proliferation of viral Google Sheets and Google Docs that break is a sign that collaboration has outgrown the collaboration tools at our immediate disposal. As the demographic of organizers and contributors has broadened and the scale of these projects has exploded, tools everyday citizens can use to spearhead these efforts have yet to catch up. Google Docs and Google Sheets were first built more than a decade ago to allow individuals to "get feedback and contributions from others [â¦] without having to email around copies of files." They were designed to facilitate the kind of collaboration we might reasonably attempt via email -- not widespread resources and movements. A Google support page states that "up to 100 people with view, edit, or comment permissions can work on a Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides file at the same time" and has a section devoted to troubleshooting files that become unresponsive after being shared with many people, recognizing the common pitfall.
The proliferation of viral Google Sheets and Google Docs that break is a sign that collaboration has outgrown the collaboration tools at our immediate disposal. As the demographic of organizers and contributors has broadened and the scale of these projects has exploded, tools everyday citizens can use to spearhead these efforts have yet to catch up. Google Docs and Google Sheets were first built more than a decade ago to allow individuals to "get feedback and contributions from others [â¦] without having to email around copies of files." They were designed to facilitate the kind of collaboration we might reasonably attempt via email -- not widespread resources and movements. A Google support page states that "up to 100 people with view, edit, or comment permissions can work on a Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides file at the same time" and has a section devoted to troubleshooting files that become unresponsive after being shared with many people, recognizing the common pitfall.
Ugh, millenials (Score:2)
With their avocado toast and free-beta-testing distributed-collaboration-tool-straining global-scale social movements. They make me sick -- I mean, good for them. Maybe good for all of us.
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I would either strongly agree or strongly disagree, if only I understood what the topic was!
Google Sheets? I know a lot of people like google, but purchasing Google branded bedding just seems to be taking the fandom too far.
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They call me the kind of the spreadsheets
I got 'em all printed out on my bed sheets
Still a great song.
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I love the Google Sheets. They are quite comfortable and have a very high thread count, so they are as soft as a baby bunny's behind.
This sounds like taking a bad decision (Score:3, Interesting)
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And yet it has major benefits. The reason such massive public services are used is that they are universally free from roadblocks. ISPs will happily block forums and websites, but how many of them have blocked Google Docs?
It's starting to become a great source of information on everything from protests to piracy and crack information precisely because mixing data in public with a public service provides it resistance. It's not perfect. It has other problems as you mentioned, but it does get around one very
Re: This sounds like taking a bad decision (Score:1)
Google Docs is blocked or monitored in China. The US (where millennials are protesting something) donâ(TM)t censor.
Itâ(TM)s free, hence its a great tool to use if you have not contributed to society yet so you canâ(TM)t afford proper tools but need to get a job done poorly.
As with Excel, itâ(TM)s being used for all the wrong reasons. People are going to take these skills and at some point enter the job market (when mom and pop dies or kicks them out of the basement). I already see people
Drink from your corporate overlords (Score:2)
these tools have earned a reputation as "the social media of the resistance;"
It's a shaky foundation for a new society, unless your dream is a techno-monarchy.
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So is electricity, and with your permission, I will now refer to the world since the proliferation of the electrical grid as an "electro-monarchy".
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You can get your own solar panels, wind turbines etc. or maybe install a generator in an exercise bike. There's no single global monopoly for electricity. But if your resistance organization relies on Google, then you are at the mercy of a single corporation.
That is a very concise statement containing logical fallacies, including reductio ad absurdum, and false dichotomy.
They are relying on Google but not in a be all and end all kind of way. If things suddenly collapsed completely, one person only needs to get original content and copy paste to move to the next tool, and it can be done with ease and speed if needed - social media is quite good at dynamically responding and reorganising - see the recent Hong Kong protests etc (which unfortunately are likely to f
Re: Drink from your corporate overlords (Score:2)
Scale? (Score:2)
Wiki.
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A single vandal brought down the first wiki. [wikipedia.org]
Granted, it may have merely been an excuse by the founder to move on to the Federated Wiki [wired.com], which nobody seems to like because of its round-about way of authoring.
Re:Scale? (Score:4, Informative)
"Whenever you loaded the page, it would just fail half the time," says Edward Saperia, who initially used Google Docs to build Coronavirus Tech Handbook, a crowdsourced directory of tools, services, and resources for Covid-19 response.
Wiki is built for handbook making. There's 100s of apps to choose from, a couple of them are even good. Tikiwiki is powerful, speedy, and easy to use for non techies. Hosting companies exist that will spin up an instance for just a couple dollars a month and the click of a mouse. They won't look at your data. You can spend more and be assured of that fact.
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For something like that, sure. But there are plenty of spreadsheets that have way more than 100 users that actually do real work. (Sure, the information should have been in a database, but that is essentially what Google sold it as originally.)
I think Sheets needed a better display-only API and a form-input API... or at least needed to better communicate its existence. That is the most common abuse of Sheets I see, although there are plenty of things that users interact with the same record/form over tim
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It's a classic case of non-techies not understanding the limits of the tools they are using. They just assumed that since previously a lot of people had collaborated on a single document, maybe 50+, they could just keep adding more.
A wiki might work but user management is more hassle. As we have seen with Zoom ease of use usually wins, even if it is technically inferior.
This is highly amusing (Score:4, Insightful)
Social movements organizing themselves using the tools provided by the behemoth of global surveillance and privacy invasion. I don't know, it's kind of like PETA holding their annual convention on a dude ranch...
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Not really because you're ignoring the reason why. Using Google Docs as a system to organise social movements (as well as many other things) is incredibly popular due to the wide spread use of the service means it invariably gets the green light from many attempts to censor.
It's easy enough for someone to block a website, quite a bit more difficult to block a service many consumers and businesses rely on. The dude ranch analogy falls short on the fact that a dude ranch doesn't rely on its overall success as
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I wasn't so much thinking of censorship as much as surveillance.
Activists who seek social reforms essentially depend on tools made by a giant monopoly that doesn't pay its taxes (oh the irony) and hand it all their wishes, ideas, plans and organizational details on a platter - to a company whose business model is to exploit the shit out of any data it can get its paws on, and mostly likely passes everything over to the authorities too.
I get the convenience aspect of it. But using Google tools for social act
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It's only amusing if think they are some kind of clandestine operation and not an open, transparent attempt to help as many people as possible publicly.
For example one of the sheets was used to match up foreign students who needed a seat to avoid being deported with citizens willing to give theirs up. Why would they not want that to be as easily accessible as possible?
And now every hacker will be targeting them .... (Score:2)
Idiots (Score:1, Flamebait)
Wonder how Office 365 would fare... (Score:2)
Did a little research and couldn't find any real world experiences to say one way or another and I can't honestly make an educated guess either.
To be honest, Google Docs seems a bit neglected to me. Granted, I'm not about change for change's sake. And honestly, if dozens of people are working on a spreadsheet (and has change tracking one), it is using a tool at its limits and Google shouldn't be faulted if it breaks down past those limits.