Open Collaboration book

You can see our Open Collaboration book at www.pioneerimprints.com

Principles of Collaboration

In preparation for a meeting tomorrow, I went back to my Gaia University Master's Degree Output Packets 2 & 6 to re-distill the Principles of Collaboration and put them in a more visual format.

I've posted them over at the 'Meta-Collab Wiki', which claims to be "a collaboration on collaboration". However, nobody except me seems to be using the site -- I welcome collaborators from far and wide to take a look at what's over there (much of it fairly academic) and start adding your thoughts in.


Whad'ya all think of these principles? Anybody find them useful in your work in the world? What other principles or directives have you found useful?



P.S. As a sort of meta-note, 'Wikia' uses mediawiki software, which is the same software used for wikipedia. As Greg Landua and others can attest to, adding or changing information on wikipedia can be a complex social & technical design challenge -- I encourage everyone to work through the technical part of things by experimenting with the mediawiki software on less-trafficked sites like Wikia.

Collaborative Currency

Mexico conference on Future of Money... from Jean-François Noubel on Vimeo.


The peer 2 peer media and software revolution is offering us a glimpse of the cooperative networked structure of future local and global economies. As an ecosocial entrepreneur and owner of a start up company providing products and services that add net benefit to the ecosocial health index, how can I align myself and my community with this emerging pattern of P2P decentralization of economy via alternative currency?

What does a collaborative currency look like?

One idea is the idea of a parking fee (negative interest) in which hoarding money is de-incentivizes by "taxing" it with a negative interested. This induces an increase of spending because no one wants to get stuck with the money, and boosts overall circulation in a community.

Any other examples of collaborative money design? here is a link to a quick article about free currencies which appear to be one kind of alternative currency geared towards the global information market .

Stigmergy for Self-Organizing Collaboration

Patrick Gibbs of Gaia University just pointed me to this explanation of the fascinating bio-psycho-social process called Stigmergy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy).

Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. (Source: Wikipedia)

I especially like the part where it says Stigmergy "supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other." -- Sounds like me sometimes! Especially when personal distress patterns have occluded my free intelligence.

But I think this is an extremely important concept, in a way much of Social Networking and Agile Project Management function similarly. Wow, Swarm Intelligence & Open Source, too! From Wikipedia:

Stigmergy is not restricted to eusocial creatures, or even to physical systems. On the Internet there are many emergent phenomena that arise from users interacting only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment. Wikipedia is an example of this. The massive structure of information available in a wiki,[4] or an open source software project such as the Linux kernel[4] could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.[5][6]

economics as collaboration

What if we defined economics as the study of how we coordinate and collaborate on a large scale to share resources to meet needs? 

With this  perspective we can see how things like open-source methodologies ( which are a way of doing mass collaborations ) may be laying down the framework for a new type of economic system.

Collaborative Technologies

This looks awesome:

A list of 'Collaborative Technologies' from the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation's Learning Exchange:
http://www.thataway.org/exchange/meta_categories.php?mcid=12&hot_topic_id=2

10 Tips for Collaboration

Check out this slideshow on www.slideshare.net:

http://www.slideshare.net/jamesr/ten-tips-for-collaboration-audio/

Definitely from a corporate perspecitve, but some useful bits in here.

How to integrate these into the Principles of Collaboration?