Online collaboration is one of the most exciting and powerful opportunities we see developing on the web. Smart organizations are finding ways to use the web to connect together people who want to pitch in on important issues. This can enable policy-focused organizations to change the way they do their business – and change the pace of progress towards their goals.

The kinds of online collaboration that we find interesting are pretty focused on solving a problem, creating a tool, generating new ideas, and more. Most groups doing this find it essential to take an incremental approach and let the initiative evolve with experience, but the efforts are still very deliberate, structured, and strategic.

Some of the innovative uses of online collaboration that I watch and try to learn from include these “ten to watch”, in no particular order:

Media Volunteer, a database of media contacts for social change organizations, comprised of data collected and vetted through the short 15 minute efforts of many volunteers. An innovative tool to enable large volunteer populations to create something of substantial value, through many small contributions.

Innocentive is an online market for companies to pose scientific challenges (and associated prizes) to scientists to solve. Figure out how to solve this problem and earn a $50,000 prize: “Identification of a non-animal base water insoluble material for use as a shell, and processes to utilize such a shell to make crushable capsules.” This service allows companies to reach out to the global (!) science community, helping to find new thinking and novel approaches.

Collaborative Drug Discovery is an online service that enables researchers to "archive, mine, and collaborate to more effectively develop new drug candidates for commercial and humanitarian markets." It's interesting because it allows researchers a controlled way to share their data with other researcher - online and rapidly.

Population and Health InfoShare, 138 partner organizations working on population and health issues around the world contribute to this central electronic library and calendar. Valuable collaboration at the organizational partner level. (Forum One client.)

Wikipedia: you know it, you use it, and its growth continues on an amazing path. It's also branching into developing online books. Wikipedia is kind of the north star of how to use massive online collaboration to build a product – hard for anyone to replicate, but setting the direction for everyone.

Ashoka Changemakers, is doing some really creative work online, conducing competitions to find better ideas for international problems like domestic abuse, health care, conservation and others. Changemakers uses the web to collect nominations, to discuss and vet them, and - once winners are selected - to host discussions about how to put the winning ideas into effect. (Forum One client.)

Global Voices online: Global Voices is an international community of bloggers, aggregating stories from around the world, drawn from hundreds of blogs by a team of 15 regional editors. GV says that western voices dominate the news media and internet, and so it “focuses on the rest of the world. We aim to bring previously un-heard voices into the mainstream media.” GV is a whole different service that any individual blog provides, or even that a blog directory would provide, as GV provides tools and structure and editorial judgment that allows users to find and track developments across an amazing array of issues and locales.

Flickr is fun, colorful, really useful, and an amazing experiment in online collaboration. Blogger Fred Wilson puts it well in describing all the things Flickr does right, including focusing on content sharing, user profiles, tagging to organize content, easy re-use of content, engagement metrics (comments, views, favorites...) and more.

“Mashups”are combinations of online services, such as data layered over the top of a Google Map, courtesy of Google provide an open interface for programmers to use. This is collaboration at the “tool-builder” level, and something I think that more policy groups should seek to enable through the design of their own services. Check out this Global disease alert map, at HealthMap.

Predictive Markets, like the Iowa Electronic Markets and Intrade go way beyond sports betting and provide markets for people to wager their views on politics, avian flu appearance, and other current events. Wisdom of the crowds turns out to be a pretty good predictor.

I know I'm not covering a lot of other interesting efforts because I don't have time or do not know about or understand them (Second Life?!) So – please share your comments!


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Media Volunteer
Innocentive
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Population and Health InfoShare
Changemakers
Flickr
HealthMap
Iowa Electronic Markets
Intrade