You’ve got your collaborative tool up and running, your team is online, what’s next?

1. sharing the right information

2. organizing that information so it’s intuitive, inclusive and easily accessible
photo credit: evelynishere

Sharing may seem like an obvious answer to how to collaborate but sometimes – having the collaborative site or tool isn’t enough. You need someone to be asking the right questions to draw out the team for answers, hold people accountable for timely answers and be monitoring for incorrect information. That’s where having at least 1 person responsible for facilitating the collaboration can be useful.

Some forums do this by being self-policing. By setting up clear policies and user guidelines on what to and what not to write or talk about. Users are assigned points or status for the quality and quantity of their posts and responses. Others rely on specific facilitators and moderators to keep the flow going in the right direction and keep the information moving at a brisk pace.

Often, those charged with facilitation need to reorganize the information so that it’s not scattered piecemeal throughout the site, but organized in a comprehensive way. You may see this on some of your favorite sites by the use of a set of site-specific tags, wiki’s and sticky posts that become permanent fixtures of forums and category groupings.

How does your collaborative tool reward content creation and manage moderation? Would you say your content is organized in an intuitive way?