I was asked to participate in a new project at work with two other folks that involves a lot of writing. Many times in the past I’ve completed a similar project by myself (or with one other person who I sat with at a single computer station). One of my colleagues has extensive writing experience and I’ve learned a lot from him over the years. He will be acting as editor on this project. The editor has always worked in a single writer / reviewer modality, which I believe is still the norm for most writing projects, but I really think things are starting to change. The internet seems to have changed everything in the last 15 years, and writing (the web is shared text) first and foremost perhaps.

I was able to quickly set up a wiki (based on mediawiki) and close it off to everyone but those involved in the project. It’s web accessible, and automatically keeps track of all changes. You can even ‘diff’ (see just the changes) between versions of the written matter.

There’s an interesting section offering one possible view of the evolution of the methods of collaborative writing in Wikipedia’s article on that topic here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_writing

…the short article also offers the best argument of such an approach: that it produces a higher quality end result than the single writer/reviewer model. This can be disputed, but it’s really difficult to make such an argument because the project evolves from an educated ‘debate’ (which is at the root of collaborative projects) and so, benefit from a larger pool of ideas, the process encourages the expression of multiple points of view, and forces those involved to deal with these other points of view in an active way - the root of learning. (a similar effect occurs in teaching a subject. Teaching usually forces you to become more competent in a subject area because you have to actually think about other points of view and evaluate how to respond to them).

This sort of collaborative approach to writing wasn’t really feasible with older technologies and is really an outgrowth of the new possibilities offered by the internet. It’s very possible that these technologies are changing the way everything gets done, and those who can change to thrive in the new paradigm will be best suited to succeed in doing anything.