Great leadership and facilitation help but they also depend on the gradual building of trust and relationships. So if all the problems of getting collaboration are social, why should we focus so much on technology? We shouldn't. You can not solve a social problem with technology. You can lower the barrier to collaboration with technology, as long as the technology itself has a low barrier to adoption. Choose Technology with Low Adoption Barrier The technology with the lowest adoption barrier is email. Everyone has an email address and an inbox. All flavours talk to all flavours. But as we know, group collaboration using email can quickly turn into a mess of emails and files. The system with the next lowest barrier is email groups. Email groups have a low adoption barrier because group members can keep using email to participate. Email groups work with all flavours of email. Effectively all they do is provide for a group what most individuals already have: an email address and an inbox . Group members email the group and the group emails the group members. The group inbox on the web makes it easy to follow several conversations at once, to search posts and files. And you can post from the web as well. By organising posts by the subject line, email groups provide a very simple way of keeping parallel conversations separate. Email groups using GNU Mailman work well via email but do not support posting from the web. Google Groups and Yahoo!