Every corporation says it values collaboration and wants to encourage more of it. Almost every piece of enterprise software claims to support collaboration somehow. But what does collaboration mean? What does it look like when it happens? How do we do it? How does the web help us do it better?

Collaboration is one of those big words isn’t it? Many of us use it, especially in business. It gets bandied around quite a lot. On the other hand, you don’t find staff using the word much. They just do stuff together. Collaboration is a bit like innovation, creativity, and engagement – words that have been hijacked and had their meaning misappropriated. You see people sharing documents with each other, having email exchanges, and talking to each other on the phone but how much of this is truly collaborative? Isn’t a lot of it simply sharing information?