When Notes founder Ray Ozzie was getting set to release the first version of Notes some 15 years ago he says he had little concept of how his ideas about online collaboration would play out in the future. It is a feeling he is having again today when he thinks about the next 15 years.

Ozzie says a changing world of online communication and collaboration, fueled by real-time tools such as instant messaging and wikis, could drive the evolution of online collaboration in any number of directions and users will have to consider if collaboration is best controlled by those at the edge of the network as opposed to centralized IT.

The Notes founder was part of a Tuesday panel at IBM/Lotus’ Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., that discussed the birth, evolution and future of Notes and collaboration. The panel, which was hosted by Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, included Ozzie, Irene Greif, a fellow with IBM Research; Mike Rhodin, vice president of development and support at IBM/Lotus; Conrad Cross, CIO of the City of Orlando; and Mike Dituro, managing director of Deutsche Bank.

Ozzie said observations of his children’s online collaboration habits have led him to think the future holds unexpected changes. Similar observations of his son’s online gaming habits helped direct him to develop Groove, his latest collaboration project that is finding a niche with small and midsize businesses and ad hoc groups working away from heavy IT control.

Ozzie said that for his kids, e-mail is dead. “They use IM. It is their e-mail. They only get e-mail from people they don’t want to talk to.”

He says the kids’ actions show that users will assemble tools in terms of what works for them and what does not. “When [my kids] want to talk long distance they download Skype (a VoIP client). They experiment with blogs and wikis.”

The point, he said, is that online collaboration happens at the edge of the network and not within centralized IT.

“The fundamental belief that we had [with Notes], that resonates now, is the fact that the people that best know how to create or adapt software systems to their needs are the people at the edge of the organization, in the business units, who understand how things work in a real every day, every hour kind of way.”