There are lots of tools for collaborating online.

Google Docs is perhaps the go-to standby for sharing text and spreadsheet documents. Evernote shared notebooks are another way of sharing files and text documents. And of course there’s Dropbox as a sort of shared hard drive in the sky.

In practice, the amount of actual collaboration that occurs on these platforms varies.

More often I find myself using Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote to share stuff with other people. But there’s rarely much collaboration.

These applications are great at solving the problem of access to documents, but they don’t do much for collaboratively working with others.

I suspect this has something to do with the way the documents and relationships with potential collaborators are structured. Once a word processing document has been started, the next people along might feel less like creating anything than editing. Perhaps go in and make a couple quick cleanups.