Collaboration is the act of working with others to achieve a common goal or overcome a shared challenge.
One of the main purposes of this site is to try to encourage Councils to collaborate with each other more. Councils are not generally in competition with each other, so sharing information and acting together like one big organisation instead of 550+ smaller ones makes perfect sense. If you can think of a project that Councils could work together on, please add it to the list below.
Collaborative Projects
- Australian Municipal Photo Library
- Local Government & Municipal Knowledge Base
- Open Standard for Asset Registers
- Open Standard for As Constructed Drawings
Mind Map
Collaboration Tools
Whilst collaboration is in essence about people working together to achieve common goals, there are a number of collaboration tools that can make collaboration easer. These include:
- Creative Commons Licencing
- Wikis & Websites
- Email / Mailing Lists / Forums
- Web-based offices suites, such as Google Docs and Zoho.
- Social Media platforms, such as LinkedIN, Google Plus and Yammer.
- Project Register
- Skills Register
- Encyclopedic Knowledge Base
- Ideas Register
- Challenges Register
- Document Libraries & Resource Lists
A Simple Collaboration Checklist
Below are a few questions you can ask yourself that may help you identify people that you can collaborate with - please feel free to add to the list.
- Have you identified as many potential collaborators as you possibly can?
- Do you know what skills they have?
- Do you know what things they are interested in?
- Do you know what pisses them off?
- Do you know what projects they are working on or have worked on in the past?
- Do you know what they would like to change?
- Do you know what ideas they have for making the world (or a part of it) a better place?
Collaboration Mechanisms
Barriers to Collaboration
Below is a non-exhaustive list of Barriers to Collaboration. Please feel free to add to the list.
- Not knowing potential collaborators or their skills and interests
- Physical separation
- An environment in which collaboration is discouraged
- A lack of collaboration skills
- A perceived lack of time
- Mutually exclusive goals
Related Pages
- Collaborative Problem Solving
- Collaborative Procurement
- Creative Commons Licencing
- Inter-Council Collaboration
- Open Collaborative Design
- Open Source Software
- Online Collaborative Writing & Editing Tools
- SCARF
- Supercharging Inter-Council Knowledge Sharing
- Wiki
Contributors
The following site members have contributed to this page:
You can contact them by clicking on their name above and selecting "write private message".