Ultimately there is reason to believe that using widely-available technology, democracy promotion organizations have the potential to greatly influence dialogue by amplifying local practitioner voices, and giving domestic organizations a channel for collaboration with international experts.
Last May, the DHS released a National Infrastructure Protection Plan NIPPP) designed to create channels for security collaboration between the government and business.
The partnerships and networks that NEXUS developed over time with other organisations and individuals - including NEXUS trainee alumni - created valuable channels for research collaborations and dissemination, as well as crucial research-policy and research-practice linkages.
As Neil Stephenson has written in the context of the decline of aspirational sci-fi, we've spent 20 years inventing, exploring and wallowing in the Internet and, as history's most democratic source of information and channel for human collaboration, I'm certainly not going to complain.
More broadly, CMI's structural alignment with the rest of the organization and its integration into the planning cycle create natural channels for often-daily collaboration.
"Stack Overflow made the decision to expand product development in our core Q&A product offerings, including Stack Overflow Enterprise and Channels for business developer collaboration and our well known core platform for developer knowledge sharing," said a statement from the company.
PPPs have come to the attention of scholars in a variety of research fields as potential instruments for channelling collaboration in traditionally public sectors.
Students generally react positively to classroom use of laptop computers that allow for easier collaboration and channels for feedback (Barak et al. 2006).
Finally, she will supervise the Office of Public Liaison, which she hopes to turn into an active channel for government-citizen collaboration.
In one of the many nooks set aside for collaboration, I visited with Charlie Todd, the founder of a channel based in New York called Improv Everywhere, which has 1.7 million subscribers.
The same goes for collaboration.
