Howard Rheingold's Library tagged cooperation →  View Popular

"The true collaboration occurs when people have the possibility to co-work on the same sub-task, activating a mechanism of new knowledge creation. Collaboration is not so obvious if is not clearly supported: the risk is to exchange this “together” learning process with a simple cooperation process, producing not new knowledge but only a simple addition of individual regress knowledge.

In this sense, collaboration has to be helped in order to avoid isolation in job and supported with a compatible scheduling of daily activities. Is also important to create “collaboration bridges” across teams and groups, involving people to participate in each other’s activities or involve experts on other areas to collaborate together. "

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collaboration wiki cooperation knowledge

"On 27 January 2009, one of us — Gowers — used his blog to announce an unusual experiment. The Polymath Project had a conventional scientific goal: to attack an unsolved problem in mathematics. But it also had the more ambitious goal of doing mathematical research in a new way. Inspired by open-source enterprises such as Linux and Wikipedia, it used blogs and a wiki to mediate a fully open collaboration. Anyone in the world could follow along and, if they wished, make a contribution. The blogs and wiki functioned as a collective short-term working memory, a conversational commons for the rapid-fire exchange and improvement of ideas.

The collaboration achieved far more than Gowers expected, and showcases what we think will be a powerful force in scientific discovery — the collaboration of many minds through the Internet."

www.nature.com/...461879a.html - Preview

collaboration cooperation collective_intelligence

"Ostrom suggests that far from a tragedy, the commons can be managed from the bottom-up for a shared prosperity — given the right institutions. That conclusion challenges orthodox economics from both left and right leaning perspectives; it suggests that, yes, markets can organize production and consumption efficiently — but only when supported and nurtured by networks and communities."

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cooperation

Her landmark book, Governing the Commons, provides an empirical rejoinder to the pessimism of Garret Hardin and others about the tragedy of the commons – it documents how people can and do solve these problems in e.g the management of water resources, forestry, pasturage and fishing rights. She and her colleagues gather large sets of data on the conditions under which people are or are not able to solve these problems, and the kinds of rules that they come up with in order to solve them.

This is, as Kieran suggests, a vote in favor of detailed, working-from-the-ground-up, empirical work, which doesn’t rely on sharply contoured theoretical simplifications and flashy statistical techniques so much as the accumulation of good data, which reflects the messiness of the real social institutions from which it is gathered.

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cooperation

Paper written as a contribution to the Ars Electronica symposium on Cloud Intelligence.

Let's take as a starting point the discussion of 'cloud intelligence' on the conference website:

In the cloud of connections, we each become social neurons, mimicking the biological human brain but on a giant scale. This collective knowledge is far beyond anything a single search engine could index and archive. Intelligence is spreading everywhere, every minute, and cloud computing can draw new links across new ideas. (80+1, 2008)

This idea of the connected world as a global brain is not new, nor surprising. It seems clear that we can identify something like social intelligence in the community, and the analogy between humans and neurons is compelling.

Peter Russell's The Global Brain explicitly makes the connection.

We have already noted that there are, very approximately, the same number of nerve cells in a human brain as there are human minds on the planet. And there are also some interesting similarities between the way the human brain grows and the way in which humanity is evolving. (Russell, 2008)

According to Russell, the brain develops in two phases. First, there is a massive explosion in the number of neurons. And second, isolated neural cells begin making connections with each other. A similar pattern, he argues, is observed in society.

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collaboration cooperation

The phrase ‘radical collaboration’ has been used to describe a variety of phenomena, from participation in Wikipedia and similar ventures to cross-disciplinary cooperation in academics. In business, it means creating alliances between a group of former competitors to solve problems together. The concept has been used by corporations: for example, when IBM was losing money on semiconductor chips in 2003, it made the decision to open its research to a network of competitors, and began a new, successful method of innovation that has now been expanded to other departments. Now some argue that the same type of innovation should be applied to the sustainability movement.

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collaboration cooperation

Michel Bauwens' mindmap

www.mindmeister.com/...everything-open-and-free - Preview

cooperation commons

In the ninth essay in Science's series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Pennisi explores why an individual would help another at a cost to itself when natural selection favors the survival of the fittest. Charles Darwin suggested that selection might favor families whose members were cooperative, and researchers today agree that kinship helps explain cooperation. But cheaters—those who benefit without making sacrifices—are likely to evolve because they will have an edge over individuals who spend energy on helping others, thus threatening the stability of any cooperative venture. That puzzle has inspired biologists, mathematicians, even economists to come up with ways to explain how cooperation can arise and thrive. Researchers have spent countless hours observing social organisms from man to microbes, finding that even single-celled organisms have sophisticated means of working together. As genomics has come of age, researchers are getting down to the genetic nuts and bolts of cooperation in a variety of systems for the first time.

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cooperation

o promote the common good, should helpers be rewarded, or should free riders be punished? Although the bulk of previous research has fingered punishment as the best enforcer, a new study published online today in Science found that rewards are more effective.

"Groups that used rewards got significantly higher payoffs than groups that punished," David Rand, a lead study author and postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, said in a Science podcast.

He and his team used a classic public goods game to study how groups of volunteers encouraged the best outcome for the most people. In a series of monetary interactions, individuals decided how much money to contribute to a common pot, and they could then decide whether to reward good contributors or punish bad—both of which would entail spending money.

Previous public goods studies had focused on one-time interactions and found that people were more likely to swindle or punish others. But in situations where interactions were repeated, people found greater success in reward-based structures—in which those that contributed were rewarded and those who didn't were ignored—than those in which costly punishment was doled out to those who didn't contribute.

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commons cooperation collaboration

Today we understand human nature and motivation far better than we did in Hardin's day. In particular, we know that individuals do not always act selfishly but also have some regard for the interests of others and the natural environment. Games such as the prisoner's dilemma and the public goods game demonstrate that under certain conditions people do behave altruistically (New Scientist, 12 March 2005, p 33). Besides, countless success stories attest to the fact that communities can overcome the tragedy of the commons without a great deal of coercion.

Putting all this together, I have identified four key conditions for the successful management of shared environmental resources: information, identity, institutions and incentives. (Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol 18, p 169). I believe we can and should use this 4i framework as the basis for a plan of action to combat local and global environmental catastrophe.

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cooperation collaboration

Downes makes the point repeatedly that we talk too much about collaboration (which is something new technology allows us to do better) and not enough about cooperation (which is something the network allows us to do for the first time on this unprecedented scale).

The neat thing about cooperation is that if you can structure a solution to a problem as a cooperative one rather than a collaborative one you can solve very big problems in a very short amount of time — because at it’s best, cooperation requires simply that you do what you normally do, but in a way that allows cooperation.

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cooperation collaboration pedagogy

Mindmap on issues arising from Tragedy of the Commons and commons management

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mindmapping commons cooperation

The best way of movement is "let's do this together" kind of experience. This is the job description shared by Brains on Fire (how great is having a name like that?) in their manifesto 10 Lessons Learned in Igniting Word of Mouth Movements.

What are movements about? They are about:

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smartmobs cooperation collaboration

My doctoral research, which was funded by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (ΙΚΥ), investigated the organization of Free/Open source (F/OS) software communities. These are communities consisting globally distributed, mostly volunteer, contributors who work collaboratively over the Internet to produce software that is protected under special copyright licences and which can be freely modified and used. Specifically, I examined the issues of commercialization and peripheral participation, which refers to the integration of new programmers and the participation of non-coders, such as translators and documenters. I focused on these two aspects because I believe that they are directly connected to the growth and sustainability of F/OS communities. The primary case studies in this research are the GNOME and KDE communities.

Empirically, my PhD contributes to an understanding of the relationship between the market and the gift economies, and the division of labour in F/OS projects. Theoretically, this research adds to the discussion on the paradigmatic shift involved in the construction and appropriation of online communities as separate socio-economic spaces with unique production capabilities. Methodologically, this doctoral research invites a broadening of the investigation to take into account the diversity of the groups organized on the basis of various agendas, priorities and skills that participate in these communities An abstract of my PhD research is available here. More information on my thesis and the research projects that I have been involved in is available on my research page.

www.sussex.ac.uk/eb32 - Preview

sharing_economy cooperation

In the social psychology of groups, social loafing is the phenomenon of people making less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone. This is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals.

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cooperation sociology

There many places in the world where it is not possible for larger companies to map them. These can be for economic reasons as is the case for Black Rock City (the temporary 40,000 person home for Burning Man). Or for political reasons as is the case for Iran and countries such as China.
As I mentioned the other day Google greatly improved their map coverage of Iran via user contributions through their Mapmaker program. These user contributions were applied just a few weeks ago. Here are before and after screenshots of two Iranian cities. The before shot was taken on September 22, 2008; the after shots were taken on May 18, 2009.

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smartmobs mapping cooperation collaboration collective_intelligence sharing_economy

he describes a convergence of humanity motivated by a love of science and unfettered by profit motives. And while building lab equipment using common household items and even synthesizing new organisms, their grass roots ethic allows the social pressure which creates a more ethical research. They're not only forming co-ops for large lab equipment, but also debating important issues. (Would it be ethical to release a homegrown symbiote that cures scurvy in hundreds of thousands of people?) This movement could someday lead to remedies for disease, fuel-generating microbes, or a social-networked disease-tracking epidemiology.

"In much the same way that homebrew computer science built the world we live in today, garage biology can affect the future we make for ourselves," argues h+ magazine, which featured the article in their summer issue.

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cooperation knowledge DIY

The Baldwin effect, also known as Baldwinian evolution or ontogenic evolution, is an early evolutionary theory put forward in 1896 in a paper "A New Factor in Evolution" by American psychologist James Mark Baldwin which proposes a mechanism for specific selection for general learning ability. Selected offspring would tend to have an increased capacity for learning new skills rather than being confined to genetically coded, relatively fixed abilities. In effect, it places emphasis on the fact that the sustained behavior of a species or group can shape the evolution of that species. The "Baldwin effect" is better understood in evo-devo literature as a scenario in which a character or trait change occurring in an organism as a result of its interaction with its environment becomes gradually assimilated into its developmental genetic/epigenetic repertoire (Simpson, 1953; Newman, 2002).

As an example, suppose a species is threatened by a new predator and there is a behavior that makes it more difficult for the predator to kill individuals of the species. Individuals who learn the behavior more quickly will obviously be at an advantage. As time goes on the ability to learn the behavior will improve (by genetic selection), and at some point it will seem to be an instinct.

The appearance of lactose tolerance in human populations with a long tradition of raising domesticated animals for milk production has been suggested as another example. This argument holds that a feedback loop operates whereby a dairy culture increases the selective advantage from this genetic trait, while the average population genotype increases the collective rewards of a dairy culture.

en.wikipedia.org/...Baldwin_effect - Preview

cooperation evolutionary_psychology

Free Riding and the Stability of Collective Behavior
Working Paper (2008)
Damon Centola
Permitting free riders to "exploit" systems of collective action can help to stabilize participation, producing greater long term levels of public goods production

dcentola.scripts.mit.edu/rms_and_Collective_Action.html - Preview

cooperation

My work addresses theoretical and empirical problems in the diffusion of collective behavior. My core sociological interest is how individual actions aggregate to produce (often unexpected) collective outcomes. This includes the mobilization of social movements, the self-organization of ethnic communities and cultural enclaves, the spread of health behaviors (such as vaccination, dieting, and condom use), and the coordination of collective beliefs (such as religious extremism and social sanctioning practices).

dcentola.scripts.mit.edu - Preview

cooperation networks social_networks