Open social scholarship implies a community of academic specialists and non-specialists working together to create, disseminate, and use research to ensure that it is engaged in broader contexts than initially envisioned. But what are the best ways to do this? The Implementing New Knowledge Environment (INKE) project on open social scholarship is working to answer this question with a collaborative team of academic and academic-adjacent researchers and partners. But this raises questions in its own right – how can researchers and partners, with differing organizational cultures, objectives and goals, and expertise, work together to further open social scholarship? Continuing research on collaboration from the first INKE project on electronic books and reading, this paper examines the nature of collaboration with INKE’s new focus on open social scholarship. Through yearly interviews of team members, it explores the nature of collaboration, its advantages and disadvantages, and measures of success. This paper will explore the collaboration’s first year of research. It will also include some reflection on collaboration in the age of COVID.