Benefits of Open Collaboration

1. Quality of knowledge: Reports are static once they are completed, and new policies and services emerge all the time. With good management and ongoing contributions from partner organisations, the wiki platform can serve as a constantly updated and relevant knowledge base.
2. Growth of knowledge: Facilitating open collaboration through the wiki will help individual efforts contribute to a more exponential growth in knowledge, when more can contribute in a coherently accumulative fashion. Having access to this collective knowledge base also reduces the burden on individual agencies and VWOs to do needs assessments and asset mapping. 
3. Community ownership: Public agencies, VWOs and researchers sometimes compete with one another to for thought leadership and authority in a specific domain of knowledge. However, no single agency no matter how well-equipped has monopoly over useful knowledge. Open collaboration democratises this work and allows all to contribute, and facilitates greater sharing so that needs assessments do not become proprietary knowledge of agencies or researchers, but free content that is more widely shared with communities and practitioners. 
4. Culture: When an organisation produces a report, its credibility and reputation is at stake. This may lead to defensiveness about the knowledge produced, and deliberate glossing over of limitations and gaps. This can detract people who are well-meaning from the task at hand. Since no single organisation can claim credit for the knowledge produced via open collaboration, a more conducive ethos of working is possible where participants are transparent about their ignorance and willing to have others fill in those gaps for them.