From the Trenches: Collaboration, even going viral takes a strategy

Every knowledge manager knows that collaboration is the ultimate goal of any knowledge management (KM) system. In my new role as the Director of KM at FSG (A professional services company dedicated to "Discovering better ways to solve social problems", I get to reaffirm this belief almost daily. Collaboration is also a linch for teh social chnage practitioner. Perhpas this is most evident in collective impact, which by definition is fundamentally about collaboration.  In my latest blog post on the FSG site (worth a read) I "re-explore' the challenge of collaboration and why strategy is so important. The post concludes  with a link to anarticle, recently published by Central Desktop, purveyors of collaboration software. Despite that fact, the article does not focus on technology, but rather the art and science of collaboration, and offers several REALLY interesting and powerful real world examples of what is possible when collaboration is addressed deliberately and strategically, including: SETI@home, the largest distributed-computer effort on earth using volunteers from around the world, collaboratively looking for evidence of intelligent life on other planets; ReCaptcha, a global collaboration project to digitize books that YOU – yes YOU have likely participated in, though you may not know it –collaboration can be sneaky; and a fun one, Stand-By-Me, part of the Playing for Change movement. I found these examples entertaining, enlightening and inspirational, and hope you do too.