When my Mom asks me about what I do for a living, often rather than explaining collaboration technologies to her, I gave her a tongue-in-cheek response something like “Oh, I do Dungeons ‘N Dragons for money.” I would go on to explain how I had created a collaboration scenario/ role-playing game that I called “The Business Transformation Game.” This game for private clients like General Dynamics, some Government agencies and pharmaceutical companies was played to help their people learn about collaboration (behaviors) and the appropriate technologies to use. Every time I played this game with clients, the results were so dramatically more effective in people learning about collaboration through a lecture that I began to wonder why everyone did not teach this way?

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Over the past decade I have been one of the loudest voices in talking about the holistic nature of collaboration and how it is about “people, process and technology.” Now, I am not recanting those ideas, but having attended the NewWow Symposium that had a focus on “Cultural differences in distributed collaborative teams” and hearing Peter Block speak about his new book “Community: The Structure of Belonging (2008)” I am not so sure that trust is the critical attribute I once thought it was for successful collaboration. Trust was originally defined in a social context by James S. Coleman (no relation) in his Foundations of Social Theory (1990) as “an action that involves a voluntary transfer of resources (physical, financial, intellectual, or temporal) from the truster to the trustee with no real commitment from the trustee.” My colleague and Collaboration 2.0 co-author Stewart Levine says “Trust is the knowledge that you will not deliberately or accidentally, consciously or unconsciously, take unfair advantage of me. I can put my situation at the moment, my status and self-esteem in this group, our relationship, my job, my career, even my life in your hands with complete confidence.”

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I am working on a project to make a current and complete list of collaborative tools. This will be eventually posted on this site as a database. In searching my own knowledge of collaborative tools and the Web, I have come up with about 1000-1200 tools, and am in the process of putting these tools into a spreadsheet, which will eventually be turned into a database.

I have created some categories to put many of the different collaborative tools into. I realize that many of these tools would probably fit into several categories, but I am putting the tool into the primary category based on its functionality. I have listed some of the categories for collaborative tools below:

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This was the theme for the 4th annual Gilbane Conference held at the San Francisco Westin on June 18-20th. I was able to attend for one day, the 19th and mostly to hear the discussions run by Geoff Bock who is the Gilbane analyst on collaboration.

The first session Geoff ran was called “Case Studies: Collaboration in Action.” This consisted of a panel of three organizations that had implemented online communities (for various reasons).

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Some of you many on even know what a codec is or why it is important to collaboration. A codec is a piece of software that does both encoding and decoding of a data stream. Codecs are most often found in both the video conferencing and audio conferencing world. For many of the collaboration tools you commonly use today you may not even be aware of the codec involved as many vendors OEM this piece of software rather than build it (smart move). On2 has one of the more popular codecs and Facebook, Sony, and Texas Instruments all use it. Global IP Solutions or (GIPS) offers both video and audio (VoIP) codecs that are used by many other vendors (Radvision, Sony-Ericsson uses it for their Smartphones, Yahoo! and even IBM uses it in their SameTime product).

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