Don Tapscott is certainly optimistic about the scope for collaboration:

"The knowledge, resources, and computing power of billions of people are self-organizing into a massive collective force. Interconnected and orchestrated through blogs, Wikis, chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks, and personal broadcasting, the Web is being reinvented to provide the first global platform for collaboration. Millions of people -- consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and even competitors -- now harness technology to innovate and collaborate like never before."

I would just offer a couple of reality checks drawn from stories I and others have been blogging over the past week.

1 There is (at least) an 80/20/2 digital divide between professionals who can really do this stuff, who can do a bit, and who are pretty stuck. I think there's a lot of 2 percenters here ... let's not be smug, but let's also be realistic.

2 Just because the technology is there for collaboration, doesn't mean people will collaborate, as Defra found with its new wiki.

People and culture make for collaboration. Attitude is more important than skills. Do we have that yet?