I see today that after Google Docs and Office Live even the MacOffice team at Microsoft is getting into the collaboration act. Collaboration is great and potentially a real differentiator for cloud-based platforms; but just allowing people to edit each others documents doesn’t really make for collaboration.
Collaboration means working together, which means working according to an agreed plan (of course you could just collaborate without a plan but we all know where that leads).
At the simplest level, collaboration is as trivial as one person writing something and have a second person “look it over” and make comments. But this kind of feature has been around for a decade or more in most tools for content creation. It doesn’t bring any massive gain in productivity because it’s still basically one person doing the creative part.
No, collaboration starts to get interesting when you consider collaboratively creating content. But in this case you don’t want just a patchwork quilt of content – you want it to read as if it was written by one person (in one sitting) even if in fact twenty people were involved in three time zones over two weeks. To achieve this you need to write down the key knowledge required for everyone to masquerade as the single virtual author of the content. Basically this means sharing mindsets; what Doug Engelbart called “boosting our collective IQ”.
In addition to working out what a particular piece of content is going to do and how to structure it. You also need to be able to share your mindset with your collaboration partners. A “mindset” sounds very abstract but really it just means an ontology (which basically just comes down to structured terminology).
On top of this if you want to pull off the trick of making the content look like it was written by one person, you had better also agree on some linguistic basics too, to avoid conspicuous differences in style, grammar, spelling – as well as things like units of measurement. The lesson of the Mars Climate Orbiter was that even simple differences in mindset can have a catastrophic effect on results. Even if you’re not building a space vehicle, you might still want your product or service to “land” safely in the market.