Making this page made me remember that I have thought more than average about how knowledge of people and in communities can be better used or combined to solve problems that affect many of us. I call this collaborative knowledge management.
That was even before we had broad access to the internet. Access to email was not yet for everybody, not even in organizations. Google did not exist.
In the nineties of the last century I was involved in experiments with the first corporate intranets and in building collaborative web-based tools to exchange knowledge. Or to use knowledge in complex decision-making situations. See Knowledge Tools.
I developed a prototype for an application that could let us search information in other languages, and that could scan relevant publications from competitors, as a way of automatic competition business intelligence. We tried to build knowledge-intensive intranet applications based on semantic networks. This was before Microsoft had launched its Sharepoint product. Lotus Notes had knowledge databases available for teams to work together though.