I have this vague recollection of @codinghorror referring to the idea below as “changing lanes” in a post somewhere, but I can’t find it
Continuing the discussion from HTML/RTF pasting:
I completely agree. Google Docs is a great solution for collaborative editing. The discussions in the margins can be more appropriate in the doc as well, particularly if they are serving to help push doc itself in a particular direction (suggestions for re-wording, etc).
That often segues into longer conversations in the margins of the docs. We’ve experimented a bit with nudging people to move those discussions to Discourse when they start to happen, but the line between the two types of discussions can be very blurred, so I think this will be an ongoing challenge until there’s some critical mass of people who are out there with similar notions of good practices that can all help nudge each other and the rest.
We’ve faced similar challenges in nudging people to move different types of conversation to and from Slack and email as well, of course.
If you’ve done things in particular that you have found help move conversations from Google docs back into a more appropriate medium for discussion, I’d love to hear about them.