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I’ve been thinking a lot about the role associations might play in helping our members work collaboratively. My thought is this: what if we could instantly connect members who are working on similar projects or that have similar needs or interests, and then provide an environment and a set of tools for them to collaborate on finding solutions?

Today, the corporate sector is using collaboration among employees, customers, and partners to drive innovation and to enhance speed to market. Web 2.0, which moves the web from a communications medium to a collaborative environment, is one of the most talked about trends in technology today. Companies are exploring new ways to let employees build on and collaborated with each other’s discoveries. And more and more products and services are being co-created with customers, leading to a practice that trendwatch.com calls “customer made.”

At the same time, many of the technologies that have opened up new possibilities for collaborative work (such as wikis, blogs, folksonomies, social bookmarking, and instant messaging), are easy to use and widely available. While most started as consumer applications on the web, they have migrated into the corporate world and are increasing becoming business tools in the same way that Excel and Word are.Already, these technologies are changing the ways in which many companies do work.

These ideas and technologies haven’t seemed to have much of an effect on associations yet, but they should. I think they open up a great opportunity for us to provide real value to our members.