Collaboration

Way-New Collaboration

Howard Rheingold

TED | Talks | Howard Rheingold: Way-new collaboration (video)

Opening Discussion Questions

What is the difference between collaboration and cooperation?

Give some examples of collaboration you see in your workplace?

About this Talk

A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities. His 2002 book Smart Mobs, predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online.

TED Talk Script

(00:00-01:39) I’m here to enlist you in helping reshape the story about humans and other critters get things done.

Here is the old story. We have already heard a little bit about it. Biology is war in which only the fiercest survive. Businesses and nations succeed only by defeating, destroying, and dominating competition.

Politics is about your side winning at all costs. But I think we can see the very beginnings of a new story beginning to emerge.

It’s a narrative spread across a number of different disciplines in which cooperation, collective action, and complex interdependencies play a more important role, and the central, but not all important role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit to make room.

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(13:25-end) Now I’ve been talking about how new forms of communication and new media in the past have helped create new economic forms. Commerce is as ancient, markets are very old, capitalism is fairly recent. Socialism emerged as a reaction to that. And yet we see very little talk about how the next form may be emerging.

Jim Surowiecki briefly mentioned Yochai Benkler’s paper on open source, pointing to a new form production, peer-to-peer production. I simply want you to keep in mind, that if in the past, new forms of cooperation, enabled by new technology, create new forms of wealth, we maybe moving into yet another economic form that is significantly different from previous ones.

Very briefly lets look at some businesses. IBM, as you know, HP, Sun, some of them most fierce competitors in the IT world are open sourcing their software. Are providing portfolios of patents for the commons. Eli Lilly, and again, the fiercely competitive pharmaceutical world has created a market for solutions for pharmaceutical problems.

Toyota, instead of treating its suppliers as a marketplace, treats them as a network and trains them to produce better, even as they also training them to produce better for their competitors. Now, none of these companies are doing this out of altruism. They are doing this because they are learning that a certain kind of sharing is their self-interest.

Open sourced production has shown us that world-class software like Linux and Mozilla can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm, nor the incentives of the marketplace as we known them.

Google enriches itself by enriching thousands of bloggers through AdSense. Amazon has opened its Application Programming Interface to 60,000 developers, countless Amazon shops. They are enriching others not out of altruism but as a way of enriching themselves.

EBay solved the prisoner’s dilemma and created the market where none would have existed by creating a feedback mechanism that turns a prisoner’s dilemma game into an insurance game instead of neither of us can trust each other so we have to make suboptimal moves, it’s you prove to me that you are trustworthy and I will cooperate.

Wikipedia has used thousands of volunteers to create a free encyclopedia with a million and a half articles in two hundred languages in just a couple of years.

We have seen that ThinkCycle has enabled NGOs in developing countries to put up problems to be solved by design students around the world. Including something to be use for tsunami relief right now. It is a mechanism for rehydrating cholera victims that is so simple to use it that illiterates can be trained to use it.

BitTorrent turns every downloader into an uploader, making the system more efficient the more it is used.

Millions of people have contributed their desktop computers when they are not using them to link together to the internet into supercomputing collectives that help solve the protein foldings project for medical researchers. That is Folding@Home at Stanford. To crack codes. To search for life in outer space.

I don’t think we know enough yet. I don’t think we have even begun to discover what the basic principles are. But I think we can begin to think about them.

And, I don’t have enough time to talk about all of them. But think about self-interest. This is all about self-interest that adds up to more.

In El Salvador both sides that withdrew from their civil war took moves that had been proven to mirror a prisoner’s dilemma strategy.

In the US, in the Philippines, in Kenya, around the world, citizens have self-organized political protests and its get up the vote campaigns using mobile devices and SMS.

Is an Apollo project of cooperation possible? A transdisciplinary study of cooperation?

I believe that the pay off will be very big. I think we need to begin developing maps of these territories so that we can talk about it across disciplines. And I am not saying that understanding cooperation is going to cause us to be better people.

And sometimes people cooperate to do bad things. But I will remind you that a few hundred years ago, people saw their loved-ones die from diseases they thought were caused by sin or foreigners or evil spirits.

Descartes said we need an entire new way of thinking when the scientific method provided that new way of thinking, and biology showed that microorganisms caused disease, suffering was alleviated.

What forms of suffering could be alleviated, what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about cooperation? I don’t think that this transdisciplinary discourse is automatically going to happen. It is going to require effort.

So I enlist you to help me get the cooperation project started. Thank you.

Discuss

What do you think of the points Howard Rheingold was making?

What ways can you bring greater collaboration into your your work?