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 .

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?

Permaculture Agriculture Search Terms

Here are the most useful search terms I've found for the current phase of Permaculture Agriculture research I'm doing:

"small farm enterprise budget"
"organic enterprise budget"
"organic crop budget"
"small farm crop budget"


Basically I'm developing an excel-based  ecological agriculture design tool to provide, in phases:
1. basic economic information & budgets for new eco-ag projects
2. detailed sensitivity analyses and a decision-making tool for eco-ag elements
3. triple-bottom line accounting for eco-ag projects

anyone else doing this sort of work?

Agile Development

Some fascinating stuff on Agile Development, Agile Project Management, Extreme Programming, and Scrum.

Extreme Programming Explained describes Extreme Programming as being:

• An attempt to reconcile humanity and productivity
• A mechanism for social change
• A path to improvement
• A style of development
• A software development discipline

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming

the Agile Manifesto (as read from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) includes many elements similar to the Principles of Collaboration that are developing:

Some of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto^[6] are:

• Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
• Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
• Working software is the principal measure of progress
• Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
• Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
• Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (Co-location)
• Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• Simplicity
• Self-organizing teams
• Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)