I'm working on a presentation that extols the benefits of collaboration using social software, like Traction TeamPage. One big benefit comes from enabling a community of participants to learn faster by having a system of open, transparent dialog.
My early realization of this benefit came from using discussion boards online to solve problems more quickly. Google makes it easy to search across communities of practice where subject matter experts post questions and answers. The internet is filled with examples of this. Information systems professionals were early adopters of this approach, even doing it before the Internet as we know it existed using bulletin boards and a dial up modem. I don't know a single geek that doesn't take great advantage of this technique, using sites like Experts Exchange and Tom's Hardware to solve problems in minutes that would have otherwise taken hours, days or weeks of trial-and-error and phone support.
Today, examples of online collaboration like this abound. Many times, a community web site will have a section called forums. Internet forums are a form of discussion board. Blogs, too, can include a threaded discussion, usually at the bottom of the page through the comments feature. (This one does. Please comment!) One can find these communities of practice on virtually any topic you can imagine; social causes, politics, sustainability, yoga. It's just about guaranteed that if you have an interest in it, someone else does too and has started a forum about it.
One recent example for me came while doing some research on residential geothermal systems. I wanted to know from the experts what it would take to increase the number of geothermal residential installations by 10x. If you want to find out how to do a geothermal project, the guys at greenbuildingtalk.com can help. They have a very actice community of people sharing their expertise with anyone that will listen. A friend recently put one of these systems in a house in Grosse Pointe Park, and we used this site to find him an installer.
With so many examples, I'm still surprised to find organizations not taking full advantage of the technique, especially applying the concept to benefit the organization's own interconnectedness. I've recently had a couple of opportunities to introduce a collaboration platform into organizations and witnessed their power to inform and engage.
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