Last year, me and four of my classmates had to make a thesis together. We didn't have much time to see each other and only a few month to write 30 pages, prepare an oral presentation and a Powerpoint presentation. Everybody had to write something and put it together with the work of others. The question was : which web tools could we use to be more efficient ?We began to send us emails which is of course the classical way of working together. But mails aren't the simplest way to work on the content. I think they're useful to organize material problems such as fixing a meeting time, saying what your problems are or explaining your point of view on the subject. But it isn't easy to work with attached files because you can't see exactly how your work is progressing.
Then, as we haven't find a day for a meeting since two weeks, we decided to meet us on MSN. The meeting was good and efficient. In our situation, I think it was a good way to write instead of speak. The group had some difficulties to speak calmly and our meetings seemed more as a big chaos than something else. With MSN, we only wrote what was important for our subject and
make real progress in our report.
The problem at this time was that nobody knew exactly who had written what and what still needed to be done. We decided to create a collaborative document on Google docs and put on it each part of our work. The puzzle was reconstituted. Each member could write something, make changes they wanted, give their opinion. Google docs is a kind of simple wiki. But, instead of Metawiki for example, the structur of the pages looks more like the "My Documents" folder in Windows, with a lot of files inside that you can link. In Metawiki, the wiki seems to me more like a real website, that you can customize (with a little css knowledge) and a tags structur which can be very useful if you've a lot of pages. They're more than 80 wiki browsers on the Net, so don't hesitate to try some of them!
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