The worldwide increase of cognitive surplus leads to successful social authoring projects. In this research, social authoring mechanisms used in Linux and Wikipedia projects were analyzed to identify the key success factors. In addition, tools used in the recent successful social media such as Facebook and Ushahidi were evaluated to extract components which may be applied in social authoring systems. Based on these analyses, the improvement factors in the design of social authoring projects were suggested. The social authoring projects are expected to be more successfully achieved by providing the core components proposed in this article.