Distributive writing

Definition
Distributive writing is the collective authorship of texts.

This further requires both a definition of collective and texts, where collective means a connected group of individuals and texts are inscribed symbols chained together to achieve a larger meaning than isolated symbols. This places emphasis on texts being represented as writings. This could be written words, iconic symbology (e.g., graffiti), computer programming languages (C/C++, Java, Perl, etc), meta-level mark-up (HTML, XML, SVG, PostScript), and their derivative works. Also, not to be excluded are all the above in various languages. Further, to define texts, we must also have an interpreter for the texts. For computer programming languages, we have a compiler, for writings we have written words interpreted by our mental faculties, and for meta-level mark-up there are web browsers, printers to interpret postscript, and various software applications which turn textual representations into another format. (Patrick Deegan and Jon Phillips, 2004)

Social Software
Social Software enables people to connect, communicate, and collaborate. It is explicity the social which is of importance and is what is operated on. It is the commodity in the system. This is different than Distributive Writing because social software is based upon software, whereas DW is not, and is not just about collaborative writing. It is also about other forms of socializing.

Collaborative software, aka Groupware
GroupWare is yet again about software and more importantly, in common use to describe combining many pieces of software together into a group for so-called easy access for an individual. The original definition had to do with a group of people operating on some thing collaboratively through software, but this has changed meaning due to corporate appropriation to describe software suites like Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.

Computer-supported_collaboration (CSCT)
Yet again, distributive writing is not just bound to computing like CSCT.

Types
Synchronous – System of authorship where both author's make changes in realtime (at the same time).

Asynchronous – System of authorship where both author's make changes in non-realtime (rendertime or not at the time).