Michael Goodchild recently coined the new term "Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)" to describe output of projects like OpenStreetMap or Wikimapia. Some might argue that already more established terms like "collaborative GI" or "crowdsourced GI" or even the infamous "Mashups" describe the same thing. They don't. In fact each of them is fundamentally different (describing often the phenomenon, but highlighting different aspects).

In his presentation at the VGI specialist meeting in Santa Barbara, he raises the example of the Waldseemüller map. In this map, the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller placed (for the first time) the label America on the south american continent. This was (a) to honor Amerigo Vespucci who explored much of South America's east cost and (b) to make clear that it is actually a new continent (before that it was assumed to be a part of Asia). (see Wikipedia for a more thorough introduction).  This map later became public knowledge, and so became the name "America". The point is, that this map is actually volunteered information. Martin Waldseemüller decided on his own to name the continent (ISO wouldn't just let you rename a continent today, of course ;). He volunteered this information, without being asked to do so. Volunteered GI is information produced without a mandate.

Projects like OpenStreetMap are big collaborative efforts to create datasets providing either already available information for free, or creating something completely new which can only be created by masses of users. But GI offered by companies like Tele Atlas is obviously also created in collaboration. The term collaborative GI refers only to the map making process, not the characteristics of the product/result. Crowdsourced, community-driven, or user-created GI is only a specialization of collaborative GI with the difference that everyone is able to contribute. It doesn't necessarily mean it's free (see TomTom's new feedback mechanism MapShare to improve their maps) or it's volunteered (projects like Amazon's Mechanical Turk try to compensate users).

Collaborative Geographic information doesn't have to be volunteered, and volunteered GI doesn't have to be collaborative.