Collaboration

Cooperation between two or more people, entities, or organizations to bring about results, such as solutions to problems or the creation of practices or technologies. Collaboration is in use across various disciplines of study and across various occupational and professional fields. Educators, librarians, scientists, medical personnel, business executives, community activists, and artists collaborate.

Technological advances from the printing press to the telegraph to the Internet have increased the possibilities for collaboration across distances. For example, the knowledge and procedures for early computer systems programming came about through a collaborative effort called Share, a voluntary group of IBM computer users in businesses across America in the late 1950s.

Collaboration can be used in a pejorative sense, particularly in reference to cooperation with oppressive regimes or totalitarian governments, and especially in reference to the Nazis in 1930s and 1940s Europe. For example, the name of the Nazi puppet head of Norway during World War II, Vidkun Quisling, is used as a negative term for collaborationist. For more information, see Akera (2001).