By definition, a collaboration is a team effort; and most teams are made up of people with different strengths and weaknesses. The best collaborations take advantage of this.

For example, you may have one member who is particularly good at making diagrams. Rather than having everyone draw on the board, you might assign that role to that member.

Other roles you might consider adopting include:

• Someone to start and maintain a summary of the group's activity.

• Someone to periodically scan the chat stream looking for suggestions or ideas that have been offered but not followed up on.

• Someone to search the Internet for useful resources.

Basically, if there's some aspect of the problem-solving process that you particularly like, or have particular difficulty with, consider whether it might be a 'role'.