Instead I spent loads of time online with my family collaborating via Basecamp, a “closed community.” We shared memories, photos, laughs and tears as we got ready to help my mother and her twin brother celebrate their 80th birthday. It became addictive – each morning we rushed to our computer to see who had written what last night. We laughed and cried. We dragged our spouse and the kids into the mix.

Tweeting and blogging simply couldn’t compare to the appeal of our real-world social network. Time I might have invested there went into the family memories project.

A week after the big birthday party – the 50-person family reunion – we’re still collaborating via Basecamp. Everyday, we’re still talking.

As my brother Dana wrote so eloquently today, sharing is the secret to a thriving family community:

Recipe for Memories

1 part shared experience
2 parts (or more) of laughter
(optional) 1 part surprise/OMG’s!
Many parts LOVE
1 freedom to share
2 (or more) people to giggle/guffaw/pee pants about the memory later

Take experience and roll out onto life’s table using both hands. Shape with words of awe and laughter, surprise (or any other emotion handy). Mix in the love—-fold gently but don’t be afraid and be too gentle. Love can handle the rough stuff.
Now, this is the tricky part: take 2 or more people and have both of them put their fingerprints all over the experience. Really get into it and make it their own. Twist it, turn it, shake it up, turn it over, run towards it and then embrace it for all you got.

Next, allow it to sit for awhile to “percolate”.
Come back to it later-in some cases, YEARS later. Add the freedom to share.
Slice it, serve it up and allow others to enjoy with you with a dash more of laughter, some tears and lots of love.
Laughter, tears and love are the spices that make it a gourmet meal.

Bon Appetit. This is your life served up just the way you lived it. Eat well.

Thanks, Dana.

I often work with an extended team of experienced designers, writers, web producers, developers and so on. Collaborating with other team members — or our mutual client — used to be a challenge before we discovered Basecamp from 37Signals. Basecamp offers a safe, secure, inexpensive hosted service to coordinate our activities. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and works well for both Windows and Mac OS X users across a range of browsers.

How We Use It

We can manage a joint calendar with milestones and simple assignments, keep an active to-do list, post messages, upload/download project files, and share comments on work in process. The user interface for managing content is simple and straightforward, as long as you rename Basecamp’s default categories into tags that are relevant to your client and/or the project.

Recently I’ve used it for several projects:

• brand strategy and brand architecture — for a leading online advertising technology provider, as well as a leader in the casual games arena
• a business plan for a consumer-facing start-up — multiple contributors working on different components of the business plan

It also supports RSS feeds, email notifications, and calendar synchronization if your calendar manager is compatible with the iCal format.

Great for Small Businesses

This is a wonderful tool for small businesses, especially those in the creative arena, operating without an in-house IT staff. It’s especially helpful if you run your business without an Exchange server because it provides some of the core functionality of Sharepoint with much less hassle for server administration.