Charlotte Pierce's List: Cooperation: HRU Jan. 2013

"Angelic Music"  
June Wolff,
Boston Globe 
"The Angels of Jazz have the audience's feet tappin' and fingers snappin'"
Kathy Uek  
Metrowest Daily News  
"The Follen Angels provide fresh arrangements to familiar classics that not only entertain, but enlighten the audience.  The group plays exceptionally well together: Hildy Grossman provides a powerful yet smooth as silk lead vocal.  Drummer Ken Dantzig plays from whisper soft to Buddy Rich hard solo, always in time, always in the pocket.  Pianist and support vocalist Reiko Tanaka provides a beautiful harmony and unique style all her own.  Together with their bass player Nick Thibault and horns by Rick Stone, they make the perfect quintet.  Their repertoire sounds unique and fresh, not dated.  Gershwin never sounded so good with a twist of funk.  This was the most fun I've had in the cabaret in a long time.  The Follen Angels are a must see!"
Andy Skurow
Producer, New York City

The HUB has it's own special recipe for collaboration. Here's a quick guide on how to create a meaningful community from a beautiful space.

Yesterday marked the opening day of the Clinton Foundation’s “Health Matters” conference in Palm Springs. I had heard a bit of advance word about the conference from a friend who was headed down there, and I had armed him with a copy of Future Perfect to give to Clinton if the opportunity arose. But the gift turned out to be unnecessary. Apparently, Clinton had just finished reading Future Perfect on his own, and spontaneously brought up a number of its arguments in an opening conversation with NBC’s Nancy Snyderman. Along the way, he managed to say kind words about three other books of mine. 

Robert Cialdini is an emeritus psychologist at Arizona State University who studies how our behavior is affected by social rules that we're only vaguely aware of but which have incredible power over what we do. What happened to Kunz, he explains, is the direct result of one of the rules that most interest him: the rule of reciprocation. The rule, he says, is drilled into us as children.

The Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) is a package of resources and activities that enable groups of people anywhere to organize, build trust, and collaboratively create solutions for problems impacting their community. The toolkit provides a dynamic framework that integrates knowledge and action to solve challenges. Designed to harness the benefits of group action and the power of open sharing, the activities draw on each participant’s strengths and perspectives as the group works to accomplish a common goal.

Our interest in trying to find a way to analyze the ecological effects of the traditional management system was stimulated by the crisis in rice production triggered by the advent of the "Green Revolution" in Bali. During the 1950s Indonesia (figure 7.1) was forced to import nearly a million tons of rice each year. The government of Indonesia was thus very receptive to the promise of higher yields from the "Green Revolution" in rice, and in 1967 launched a major program called BIMAS (Bimbingan massal, or "massive guidance") to boost rice production by providing farmers with high-yielding rice seeds and access to fertilizers and pesticides. The new rice varieties grew faster than the native crops, and farmers were encouraged to triple-crop the new rice whenever possible. BIMAS reached pests. in 1971 and by about about 70 percent of the rice terraces in South Bali were planted with Green Revolution rice. At about the same time, the Asian Development Bank began a major irrigation development project in Bali. Rice production increased, but as early as 1974 field-level agricultural officials in Bali were reporting "chaos in water scheduling" and "explosions of rice pests. In 1984 I wrote an unsolicited report to the Asian Development Rank, in which I tried to show how these problems were linked to their disruption of the traditional system of water management.

Robin Murray explores the potential of co-ops to form the basis of an alternative economy

Here’s a quit extensive synthesis of  “The Penguin and the Leviathan,” in my opinion a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in improving and transforming our economic and political institutions.
 
Human motivation is a subject that ‘makes me tick’. I really enjoyed reading “The Penguin and the Leviathan”, not only because it paints a much nicer picture of “human nature” than the one used by the free marketeers, but also because it gives a glimpse of a future, higher form of society that will be much more based on human cooperation. I think it is important to see that the seeds of this future society are very much present today.

Can the threat of being shamed or the prospect of being honoured lead to greater cooperation? We test this hypothesis with anonymous six-player public goods experiments, an experimental paradigm used to investigate problems related to overusing common resources. We instructed the players that the two individuals who were least generous after 10 rounds would be exposed to the group. As the natural antithesis, we also test the effects of honour by revealing the identities of the two players who were most generous. The non-monetary, reputational effects induced by shame and honour each led to approximately 50 per cent higher donations to the public good when compared with the control, demonstrating that both shame and honour can drive cooperation and can help alleviate the tragedy of the commons.

Most of GEO's readers are practitioners of economic collective action. They may be wondering why GEO is dedicating an entire issue not only to the practice of, but the theory and research of collective action as well.

Dog parks are popping up everywhere. They're among the most popular urban amenities and demand for them has been steadily increasing since the first one was introduced in Berkeley, California in 1983. In 2010 there were 569 dog parks in the 100 largest U.S. cities and the popularity of dog parks continues to grow They offer dogs a place to play off-leash, get some exercise and socialize, and they're good for humans too. Dog parks provide us an opportunity to get outside, meet our neighbors and spend quality time with our pets. And it turns out that they can teach us something about the commons.

Any group that attempts to manage a common resource (e.g., aquifers, judicial systems, pastures) for optimal sustainable production must solve a set of problems in order to create institutions for collective action; there is some evidence that following a small set of design principles in creating these institutions can overcome these problems.

I just finished listening to a podcast of Jeremy Rifkin discussing his new book  "The Empathic Civilization" on CBC Radio's excellent "Ideas" program [download].  It's a sweeping intellectual quest of a book that sets out an escape route from the corner we are busy painting ourselves into.

Computer-mediated communication systems are believed to have powerful effects on social relationships. Many claim that this new form of social interaction encourages wider participation, greater candor, and an emphasis on merit over status. In short, the belief is that social hierarchies are dissolved and that flatter, more egalitarian social organizations emerge. Networked communications, it is argued, will usher in a renewed era of democratic participation and revitalized community. But as with earlier technologies that promised freedom and power, the central problems of social relationships remain, although in new and possibly more challenging forms.

I first heard from Jennifer Jacquet in July 2006 when she invited me to speak about Russian-American sea-otter hunting to the weekly seminar of the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia. To the usual request for a title and abstract, "at your convenience" she added "though if you do it by Saturday I could hang the poster before I leave for Africa." I did.

Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and the selfish motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. The evidence indicates that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment. These results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.