When we talk about ‘Social Collaboration’, whether inside of SharePoint or not, what do we mean? The widely held definition, “…a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together intersection of common goals ….” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration), makes sense of course, but what does that mean in the ‘Web 2.0’ era?

If a team of 2 or more contribute information on the same document in a SharePoint Document Library, is that the most social collaboration in a corporate environment?  Is having a blog for sharing ideas and inviting comments on those ideas the extent of this concept?  What about discussion boards where a person posts a thread (question/idea) to elicit a response from a community that may spawn other questions and/or ideas inside of that thread?

I would go out on a limb and say that it is all this and more.  Any situation or technology where we work together learning from each other, re-using ideas to save time, and helping the company (and employees) move faster.

I say that Social Collaboration is about the whole becoming greater than the sum of its part, all by working together more-and-more.