Effective Collaboration... let me count the ways

Interesting... today I saw the word "collaborated" mentioned in 2 blog articles which were only about 7 items apart on the main feed.

    http://weblogs.asp.net/omars/archive/2004/06/18/158994.aspx
    http://weblogs.asp.net/AdiOltean/archive/2004/06/18/159046.aspx

This is coincidental because only this morning I decided that the topic for next weeks developer meeting would be "collaboration".  This means that the guys in my group need to find interesting ways to discuss "collaboration" such as how we use it and how you can do it effectively.

Merriam Webster offers the following definition for collaboration:

    "to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor"

My favourite collaboration method is to have an vigorous whiteboard session but I'm sure that given our digital environment there must be many envigorating ways to perform the activity in a virtual manner.  Anyone have any offbeat or successful methods of collaborating which they'd like to share? :-)

UPDATE: More, ad-hoc collaboration thoughts...

I just remembered another one of my favourite collaboration tools: Brainstorming ideas via a mind-map. 

One of the guys at work asked me about some of the features of collaboration and I said that I thought that, importantly, collaboration implies active participation as opposed to passive participation.

I've also recently started developing activities which promote more collaboration between team members and also encourage people to collaborate with different team members as opposed to always collaborating with the same people.