A large variety of sophisticated collaboration tools and systems are used in both the open source software movement and by programmers in commercial environments - e.g. for version control and bug tracking (e.g.the open source bugzilla bugtracking system) when many programmers are working on shared projects. Some of these may be useful for other kinds of collaboration as well.

Background reading

• "Free and open source movements: Part 1 - History and philosophies" by Siemens (2003) is a comprehensive introduction to the field.
• Keats (2003) has written an interesting proposal on using the open source software movement as a model for collaboratively developing open educational content for African universities.