User:Kashefi/sandbox

Infrastructures
Following (technical) infrastructures enables distributed collaboration over traditional collaboration:

Internet
The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills through the internet has made collaborative work dramatically easier. It allow files to be exchanged, drawings and images to be shared, or voice and video contact between team members. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and test, but the wide reach of the Internet allows such groups to easily form in the first place, even among niche interests. An example of this is the free software movement, which produced GNU and Linux from scratch.

Collaborative software
Computer-supported collaboration focuses on technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and societies. Collaborative software designed to help people involved in a common task to achieve their goals by creating a computer supported cooperative work, which includes all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music,. It addresses "how collaborative activities and their coordination can be supported by means of computer systems."

Base technologies and software such as netnews, email, chat and wikis could be described as social, collaborative, both or neither. Those who say "social" seem to focus on so-called virtual community, while those who say "collaborative" seem to be more concerned with content management and the actual output. While software may be designed to achieve closer social ties or specific deliverables, it is hard to support collaboration without also enabling relationships to form, and hard to support a social interaction without some kind of shared co-authored works.

Cloud and document collaboration
Document collaboration is a system allowing people to collaborate across different locations using Internet, and cloud collaboration enabled approach. In recent years, the market has seen a rapid development in document collaboration tools. Primitive document collaboration used email, whereby comments would be written in the email with the document attached. However, if the email is then forwarded or replied to, the comments can be easily lost, also it is hard to keep track of the most recent version of a document. [Document-centric collaboration]] is the next step in the evolution of document collaboration. These systems put the document and its contents at the center of the process and allow users to tag the document and add content specific comments, maintaining a complete version control and records and storing all comments and activities associated around a document.

These new innovations are only possible because of the development of cloud computing, whereby software and applications are provisioned on the Internet. Cloud collaboration today is promoted as a tool for collaboration internally between different departments within a firm, but also externally as a means for sharing documents with end-clients as receiving feedback. This makes cloud computing a very versatile tool for firms with many different applications in a business environment.

Crowdsoursing
Crowdsourcing is to divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. In modern crowdsourcing, individuals or organizations use contributions from Internet users, which provides a particularly good venue for distributed collaboration since individuals tend to be more open in web-based projects where they are not being physically judged or scrutinized, thus can feel more comfortable sharing. In an online atmosphere, more attention can be given to the specific needs of a project, rather than spending as much time in communication with other individuals.

Crowdsourcing can either take an explicit or an implicit route. Explicit crowdsourcing lets users work together to evaluate, share, and build different specific tasks, while implicit crowdsourcing means that users solve a problem as a side effect of something else they are doing. Advantages of using crowdsourcing may include improved costs, speed, quality, flexibility, scalability, or diversity. Advantages of using crowdsourcing may include improved costs, speed, quality, flexibility, scalability, or diversity. Crowdsourcing in the form of idea competitions or innovation contests provides a way for organizations to learn beyond what their base of minds of employees provides.