Hello;
I just joined the list, and my background in collaboration/cooperation
has been in 2 areas: large scale urban community-based work and art and
science work. In both areas, I believe it is essential to establish a
shared language.
A few examples:
1. In cooporations between scientists, the shared language of
mathematics can be a starting point. In art/science cooperation,
sometimes terms from mathematics have different meanings in the arts.
One of my ongoing collaborations has been with atmospheric scientists in
the sonification (translation of data to sound) of weather data
<http://www.andreapolli.com/studio/atmospherics>. During the
development of the project, one of my collaborators began talking about
the need to 'interpolate.'   Another collaborator became alarmed by this
idea, believing that he meant 'interpolate the data' that would depart
from our shared desire to accurately represent the data. It turned
after much spiritied debate out that the interpolation he was talking
about was in sound, not data.    
2. Sometimes even basic terms can become stumbling blocks.   At an
interdisciplinary workship that included computer and gis scientists,
meteorologists, psychologists, and one artist (aside: I told one of the
psychologists that I felt out of place and in true psychologist form she
said 'Everyone feels out of place.' :-) For an entire day of the 3 day
workshop we got stuck on the definition of a term. The term? 'event'
Each discipline defined an event in vastly different ways.
As we move into extended networks of cooporation, the definition of the
'event' for artists also becomes murky. Is a synchronous event the same
as an asynchronous event for example? What about events that combine
synchronous/asynchronous? What marks the beginning and end of a
cooperation?
3. My last example is an example from urban community collaboration.
In this example, I want to extend the discussion of 'language' to maps
and boundaries. In one collaboration with inner-city youth in Chicago,
we had to travel to various neighborhoods to create video documentation.
The process became a learning experience for me as I discovered that
there were boundaries between neighborhoods that were very important to
the youth that I wasn't aware of. Through the project, we were able to
re-define these boundaries, effectively expanding the world of the
participants. I'm sure many of the participants on this list can speak
to the importance of maps as a shared and evolving language in
collaboration.
A few years ago, I was a participant in Bridges, the International
Consortium on Collaboration in Art and Technology
<http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/bridges/>, and one of our primary goals
was to try to find a shared language between artists and scientists, and
there is some information on the site this group might find useful.

--
Andrea Polli
Associate Professor
Film and Media
Hunter College
695 Park Ave.
New York, NY 10021
212.772.5589
http://www.andreapolli.com