As your lists of Conversations, Social Objects, people, and groups grow, you can organize the ones that focus on a common topic, project, or issue into an easy-access list, called a collection. A collection is a list of links that you create for navigating to Conversations and walls that relate to a common idea, goal, project, or other common interest.
Imagine that you're working toward solving a supply-chain issue. One of your vendors was acquired by a significantly larger company, and it's causing unexpected delays in component deliveries. You begin a series of Conversations covering possible ways to work around it: Expediting Deliveries, Alternate Sources, Designing Around Dependencies. As your list grows, you find you need a way to keep these related Conversations from getting swallowed up in the exponential increase of Conversations created by your co-workers.
Here's where collections come in. You create a collection (Resourcing) and add to it the relevant Conversations you've created. You add members from your product team and key people from procurement. You post a message on its wall—Let's get what we need on time!— and flag your new membership to bring it to their attention. Other colleagues create their own related Conversations and add them to the collection: Going Overseas; Local Sources; Redesign Roundtable.
Now when you want to review all relevant discussions, you can go to your collection and access every single Conversation relating to your project in one convenient location.
When you create your collections, you can give them meaningful names so it's easy to identify their purposes. You can add Conversations and walls (including people's walls and group walls) to a collection. You can also add Social Objects and other collections to a collection to create a hierarchy.
As you, your team, and other interested parties work towards solving resource issues, it becomes apparent that there are three main working areas:
Helping your original source succeed
Finding another source
Redesigning around the dependency
The heads of each of these efforts create their own collections under Resourcing—Outreach, Re-Sourcing, and Exploring Redesign. They add the Conversations and walls that relate to their particular effort, and remove them from Resourcing. So now, when you open the Resourcing collection, you see three sub-collections, each containing links to all the Conversations and walls that are relevant to their area.
There is no limit to the levels of hierarchy you can create.