Collaboration

The timeline affords exploration and discovery of content

Information is the substance of their work and more information is the output of their work: Research, proposals, priorities, direction and decisions?

knowledge is gained and shared

how people actually work

confluence

simple items which can interact and be managed with one other

It’s important, I think, for the Open Source community to recognise that there needs to be a collation of tools to make that one killer app - straying away from the “do one thing and do it well” mentality, sure, but that’s where things seem to be headed. Mediawiki + Unobtrusive Sidenotes + a good WYSIWYG editor + some way to integrate with OpenOffice/KOffice + an email interface for email-to/from-wiki + good RSS Feeds + LDAP/AD Authentication + iCalendar (or some wikiable calendar) + exporting to PDF + whatever else as one package will provide some really stiff competition to Sharepoint, which is only improving in integration with Office with the upcoming 2007 release. You could probably use a bit of AJAX to do a number of the extras. Something like Confluence. Without of course taking Mediawiki too far down the same path as Sharepoint - it’s important that at its core, Mediawiki remains a wiki and not a bastardised spawn-of-wiki-CMS.

Let's face it. Most of us out here in the open source community are getting a very good deal. We are fortunate to have bright people building software for us at little to no charge. If we begin to depend on these freely given gifts, we should never make the mistake of then assuming the one giving the gift is somehow accountable to us. Gifts given should be received with gratitude and an expectation of nothing further. Nothing. And, if we aren't able or willing to help, the least we can do is try not to ruin the fun!!! Thanks, Bèr! I appreciate your article very much.

Redshaw said that rather than an age bias, he noticed more of an executive level bias to collaborative efforts: the higher up in the company's hierarchy the less social networking technologies get used. "That's a good thing," he said. "The real work gets done not in the board room."