Last year, we interviewed 34 transportation practitioners; 31 of those 34 interviewees said that better collaboration tools would bring significant improvements to their day-to-day workflows. One research participant expressed the pain well: “It’s the communication among different players who are involved in the project that is the most frustrating, and I hope that there’s something out there that can make this easier for [transportation planning]. Email communication is redundant and doesn’t always get the point across.” After conducting this research and continuing to listen to our 375+ partner agencies, we launched Remix Commenting to streamline multi-stakeholder conversations that help you get buy-in on your projects faster.
Remix Commenting makes it easier to have collaborative conversation: project context is included in the Remix map, eliminating the need for lengthy email chains.
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Remix users can find even more ways to share and collaborate with Project Sharing 2.0. Project Sharing was always a feature in Remix, but Project Sharing 2.0 takes all the best parts of the collaborative cloud-based tools you know and love - like Google Docs, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams - and applies them to Remix’s mapping interface. In doing so, this newest feature improves three critical workflows for the planning practitioner:
1. Streamline collaboration
With Project Sharing 2.0, you can now invite collaborators in Remix and determine what level of engagement they have with your project.
Invite collaborators directly in a Remix project and define how you want to collaborate with them.
It’s easy for things to get lost in the information shuffle and you may frequently ask yourself, “Has this person even seen what I sent them?” With Remix, you can now see a list of who has opened your project and who hasn’t. Using this list to remind collaborators of your shared project might be all your project needs to get up and running.
When your project reaches a certain stage, you might want to transfer it to another colleague or team. Say your project is ready for public outreach, simply transfer the ownership of your project from yourself to the community engagement team so that they can start leveraging your work immediately.
2. Add clarity to conversations by ensuring that the right collaborator sees the right thing at the right time
Now with Project Sharing 2.0, you can direct your comments to specific collaborators by tagging their names. This ensures that your collaborators see the right comment, along with the appropriate visual context on the map. Anytime you tag a collaborator, they receive a notification, both in Remix and in their email inbox.
Tag colleagues in comments and receive notifications for any mentions in comments.
3. Deepen public engagement
Some projects are ready for public input, and some are not. That’s why Project Sharing 2.0 helps you control precisely which aspects of your project that members of the public can and cannot see. Once you’re ready for community engagement, you can deepen it by allowing members of the community to see comments contributed by other people and respond to them so that conversation with community stakeholders can happen directly in a Remix map.
Adjust public view settings and provide community members with the option to converse with you in Remix.
With Project Sharing 2.0, you have greater control over who and how you collaborate in Remix.
Collaboration gets your projects across the finish line
We didn’t just build Project Sharing 2.0 to improve collaboration for collaboration’s sake. We understand the impact that effective collaboration has on getting projects done successfully. As Adam Smith with Metro Transit said of his collaboration with the City of Minneapolis in working on the METRO B Line BRT Project, “The interagency coordination aspect [of the project] is critical for everything we do.” A big transportation project is unlikely to meet every stakeholder goal, but a collaborative process brings together seemingly discordant priorities and successfully connects them under larger community goals. Interested in learning more about how your team can use Remix to collaborate? Reach out to us at remix.com/demo.
