Opinions, experiences, ideas are worth sharing.

Some of us share less than others, while others love an audience. With the internet and social media, people share on a whole new level. There are a few key rules of sharing if you want real collaboration.

Sharing stems from our natural tendencies to want to express a point of view. Tools have emerged to make sharing easier, which results in more information being shared and to a larger audience.

More sharing means richer content. According to James Surowiecki[1], in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, the best decisions are made from the aggregate of input rather than one loud voice. A discussion draws in more of your attention than one person’s opinion.

How about under-sharing or over-sharing? Failing to illicit others’ inputs can result in boring monologues rather than enlightened dialogues. And too much information causes information overload, which needs more time to sort through. Too much input will confuse you and requires even more time to sort through.

Privacy concerns can stop other-wise great contributors from sharing. Information you share may not always be sent securely. People may have access to information that doesn’t concern them. On the other hand, it is difficult to add new people into an existing conversation that actually does concern them. Good sharing means striking the balance of both privacy and information.

Collaborative applications need to honor good sharing by being easy to use and ubiquitous. They should let you engage people and provide a secure outlet for private discussions as well as letting you share existing or previous conversations with new people if the need arises. These applications must take into account staff turnover. And most importantly, they must enable filtering so you can avoid drowning in a sea of information.

Designed with the principles of good sharing in mind, CORUS is an online collaboration application so it runs on any web browser. It allows discussions to be seen only by those you have granted access to. You can easily filter information using tags to avoid information overload. Mainly, CORUS is built for collaboration, so it enables both file sharing and discussions for a richer dialogue.