one of the longest running projects in computing/software engineering is to find usefull tools to facilitate people working together over networks.
see Doug Engelbart and the Bootstrap Institute for some context
see Xanalogical Media for some of the problems/challenges
realtime based systems, for discussions + interaction in the same online 'place'
shared workspaces
archival
summaries and commentries
report on using groupware for scientific collaboration, with a very general approach http://udell.roninhouse.com/GroupwareReport.html
links
notes this should probably be padded out with a discussion on the pros + cons of all these methods (and more). see the tgarden notes + feedback
defunct, but interesting framework ISAAC http://realfun.isrl.uiuc.edu/ISAAC/
reasearch projects on multimodal information management http://www.im2.ch/home.php
dialog mapping
a technique developed by http://www.cognexus.org/ to help manage problem solving and design meetings, and other sources of 'wicked problems'. involves the use of Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS).
and the related field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Argumentation (CSCA) http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/sbs/csca/
(as of ~2014)
collaboration tools http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?CollabTools
knowledge mapping tools http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?KmMapTools
Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling (TCM) is a collection of software tools to present conceptual models of software systems in the form of diagrams, trees and tables. A conceptual model of a system is a structure used to represent the behavior or decomposition of the system. TCM is meant to be used for requirements engineering, i.e. the activity of specifying and maintaining requirements for desired systems, in which a number of techniques and heuristics for problem analysis, function refinement, behavior specification, and decomposition specification are used. http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~tcm
collaborative document editing on OsX with hydra > http://hydra.globalse.org/ ( now subethaedit)
knowledge media design inst. http://kmdi.toronto.edu/
Collaborative Tools for Groups with “gloopy, gloppy, web2.0-ish names” » http://mashable.com/2007/07/22/online-collaboration/