Effective collaboration, in my opinion, is an important part of everyday life, but rests heavily on all participants from a group. I don’t think these participants need to have anything in common personally because everyone thinks about things differently giving you a larger variety of opinions. For example, in my position at work, we build a lot of new processes to make our company more efficient. The participants involved in this group do not share common interests, but because we share the same goal, everyone brings something valuable to the table – knowledge. We help each other identify the areas needed for improvement and work towards refining them. It is similar to what we are doing for our peer reviews – using the knowledge and ideas posed by others to refine our drafts. It can really be construed in many ways, but someone will always think of something someone else didn’t and without contributing that knowledge or idea to the topic, you impact all.