Power of Groupware

There are many ways to define power of groupware. Power could be measured for example by economical factors or just by goodwill-value for certain group. With economical factors we would look after commercial groupware software like IBM Lotus Notes (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/L/Lotus_Notes.html). With economical factors Lotus Notes could be quite powerful, but if we use goodwill aspect I would guess that Lotus Notes is not so powerful. Git (http://git-scm.com/) could get good scores from economical factors and from goodwill-value measuring because git is used for Linux-kernel development. Newsgroups and several different discussion boards in the Internet are good example of software platforms which can fit in to definition of groupware. Usually newsgroups and discussions boards are not so powerful with economical factor measurements, but they offer good goodwill-value for their users.

In the world of wonderful Internet there is one thing what has demonstrated its power. That thing is 4chan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan) , which is pretty simple image board where users can share their images and discuss of them. Images can be posted to this board anonymously and somehow that came a starting point for Anonymous -group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29) which is responsible for many campaigns on internet and in real world. As a groupware 4chan is very very powerful. Currently 4chan has tools to mobilize large group of Anonymous group members to achieve some goal and usually goal is reached. This is possible because influence power of 4chan is simply amazing. 4chan is able to make people with different backgrounds to work for the same goal. Backgrounds of the Anonymous group members can vary from hightech professionals and lawyers to 12yo manga drawing kid. IMHO The best definition for Anonymous is Chris Landers writing in Baltimore City Paper April 2, 2008:
"Anonymous is the first internet-based super consciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they're a group? Because they're traveling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely"

For me this Anonymous -phenomenon is the greatest example how groupware can be utilized to make people work for the same goal.