Collaborating and Sharing Bring Real Value

Chris Heuer shared a link to a great post by Christian Kreutz, who hits on my favorite topic that I hope becomes more valuable the more we understand how it.  It’s the underlining meaning for why we work together and share our collective experiences, discoveries…and I’d say even our emotions…with our teammates. Information is free most of the time, but we can bump up the value every time we touch it, favorite it, bookmark it, tag it, collect and sort it then share it. That helps us more quickly find the right people and right information we we want. That’s the power within an organization, not the classical hierarchical, political structure most people are dealing with today.

Christian offers these “bottom-up approaches”:

• Start a collaborative tagging experiment over del.icio.us with colleagues to see how easy the sharing of valuable information can be, or open up a room on friendfeed to discuss right away resources.
• Use external tools for your team to make project management easier. One example could be a blog for your project’s history, milestones and other management tasks.
• Connect with colleagues through existing social networks such as Xing, Linkedin or Facebook and use it for exchange.
• Extend informal activities on the web and make other colleagues be aware of it: bulletin board, liftsharing etc.

Separately, but complimentary….Chris offers an example of how FriendFeed can replace email as a collaboration tool.