Part of my work is collaborative work, and part of collaborative work are rules.

In a professional way, there are document creators and owners, who invite others to collaborate on a document. Changes are being seen in the revisions history. But the main part of collaboration is not that you can make changes but to talk about changes. That’s more a technical part.

Collaboration means informing people about changes and discuss it. That’s why I always suggest chat solutions combined with collaboration tools. and by the way, that’s the recipe of success for Wikipedia: The discussions are improving the quality.

So if you are thinking about collaborative tools, think about in total. Use the whole power of it. Because, if you start using this tools alone, then you will fail.

So just think about these steps:

Create a document

Start with some content

Write some comments on critical parts or where you think a discussion is useful

Invite others

Follow revisons

Work together on the document

Supervise it as you are the creator who needs at the end the best quality

Make decisions if needed

Note: Collaboration is a tool, not a philosophy. It should help working together and improving quality of work.