One of the areas that emerged from my conversation with BT's Jeff Patmore was the extent and appropriateness of the different types of collaboration within an organisation or group and how those snippets, chats, discussions, conversations are eventually acted on and ultimately formalised, whereupon a channel is finally adopted for that 'capture' of useful business information.

It could be a Facebook group, or another community within a social networking group, or a wiki which generates 'pre-formal ideas'. It could be that if the information is likely to be business critical, it will need to be 'discussed' through a more secure channel. As you get closer to the front end of business  - you could call it 'the business end of the discussion' - then there needs to be a more rigid, and less ad hoc way of communicating.

A long time ago I came across Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which says that human beings are motivated by unsatisfied needs, and that certain lower needs  - physiological, safety, love, and esteem - need to be satisfied before higher needs can be satisfied.

I wonder if such a hierarchy of needs could apply to or be established for collaboration.