Collaboration or collaborators?

Interesting article from the Winter 2009 Texas Library Journal, "Seven Keys to Sustainable Digital Collaboratives," by Liz Bishoff
http://www.txla.org/CE/Collaboration/Bishoff.pdf

Quoting from the article, "Collaboration virtually unifies
content that is distributed across multiple owners, allows
organizations to capitalize on strengths of diverse organizations,
and takes advantage of economies of scale. As a result, many
funders will give preference to collaborative to proposals where
all other things are equal."

Very true. Very interesting. Looking at the big picture, I can bluntly and with complete veracity state that, if collaboration doesn't occur in digitization, we're going to lose major portions of our cultural heritage. This brings us back to my earlier question of what would I have saved had it been the year 764. Fortunately, there's no imperative to make that decision--but it might be a good idea to recognize that we have a lot of resources, both technological, human, and artifactual, that must be incorporated and considered in digitization.

(Which Bishoff seems to be highlighting, though it is only a highlight.)

As I've been observing digital collaboration, I am an outsider coming from an IT and technical communication background; I'm trying to "break into" the field, though my main purposes in doing so is to recognize how communication needs to be improved, how workflow should be developed and managed, and where skillsets currently are being wasted. In some ways, I'd even argue that so many digital collaboratives fail not because the resources were lacking, but because no one recognized they existed or could figure out how to engage them. And there is the angle of politics in academia.

The most important step in collaboration is getting all participants to recognize that the final product is most important; the other reason most collaboratives fail (not just in digitization but in any sort of team effort) is that individuals are too busy competing to recognize that the integrity of the end product is the only thing that is important. In digitization, the reason the integrity is important is because the end product is what we pass on to our heirs. If we collaborate well, we'll leave a strong cultural history for future generations, and if we collaborate poorly, well, what will future generations think?