EllenGottesdiener has a pretty good article on CollaborationPatterns:
wallOfWonder
Here's another article: http://www.sdgnews.com/archives/2000/sd2000es/sd2000es005/sd2000es005.htm
Quote from second article: "According to Gottesdiener, collaboration patterns are collections of reusable techniques and activities (such as tasks or actions) that can be used by IT and customer teams in a group setting to work together more effectively. Goals of collaboration patterns include defining project scope, user requirements and ongoing process improvement."