Charting the waters of collaboration

My boyfriend, Warren, is — unapologetically — a geek. He loves spreadsheets so much that I tell him I’m considering launching a line of Excel-based lingerie and sleepwear for myself and other partners of data junkies. Because maybe, in the end, the quickest way to a geek’s heart is via a pie chart or bar graph.

I also mentioned, in a recent blog post, that Warren, who works for a Big Company in an office 40 hours a week, regularly quizzes me about this coworking thing. He was demanding to know more about collaboration potential and challenged me to come up with examples of success cases. Which, of course, I did, no problem. (And which, of course, I did by collaborating with other coworkers.)

So now I discover a web site so targeted to Warren and his ilk, I wish I could wrap it up and hide it and give it to him for his birthday. Many-Eyes allows users to upload data sets and then create a variety of visual graphic representations of that data. Not only that, but other users are encouraged to take a look at your goods and offer their input, the idea being that this collaboration might lead you to still better graphics.

There’s a whole story about Many-Eyes in the New York Times, with examples of charts and graphs, one of which is bursting with colors and looks suspiciously like a spreadsheet I created not long ago. That was to help keep track of information in a book Warren and I are collaborating on. His take on my graph? He pronounced it a Rubik’s cube and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a judgment worthy of the High Praise category. So I like a lot of colors in my graphics — sue me.

According to the Times story, Many-Eyes “was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.”

Downside? Well, for now the site seems to be extremely touchy and fragile. So far my attempts to upload data have been fruitless. Perhaps, once I do get in, I’ll do a test run by entering information like: number of times I attempted to access the site; number of times I failed; number of times I succeeded; number of emotions I went through in the process.

I hope my online collaborators will help me come up with a resultant graphic that is sassy, smart, and, okay, maybe even a little bit sexy, at least in the eyes of geeks.

Visualization of LaunchPad Coworking executive summary done using Wordle, which is now part of Many-Eyes.