Jon Stahl pointed me to Stowe Boyd's superb essay, Metaphors Matter, in which he essentially says that collaborative and social technologies are too important to be left to the technologists:
Technologists -- and I am a recovering technologist, so I know -- focus on the tools, the plumbing, and information flow. Collaborative technologies are viewed as pipes that bits float through; people are sources and sinks for messages, or documents, or other artifacts through these pipes...
But people focus on other people, not the infrastructure they tread upon. They don't -- in general -- think about information in some disembodied way. They instead focus on their goals, their partners and clients, and when they think about getting things done, they approach it from a social perspective. "What will Jane think about working closely with Rich on this project?" or "Carlos doesn't have great presentation skills, so who can we get to do the sales pitch for Company X?" or "What is the best group of people to pull together for this project?"...
I don't believe we can cede control of these essential tools to the technologists. It's not about information flow, or other industrial themes of efficiency. Its about human interaction and the benefits of new ways to interact. The tools are only a means to that end.
I'd extend Boyd's concept beyond collaboration tools per se and apply it to the whole user-friendly apparatus that allows non-techies like me to self-publish online (and allows non-techie readers to find me): everything from domain registrars like GoDaddy, to blog hosts like TypePad, to aggregators like Bloglines, to user-driven folksonomies like Technorati.
But let's not kid ourselves--we still have a long way to go to get these tools in the hands of the people who need to use them most.
Photo Credit: "The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," 1963, National Archives, from the book "The Power of the People, Active Nonviolence in the United States," © 1987 by New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA