The open source movement embodies the spirit of collaboration. Yohai Benkler dubs it ‘the wealth of networks.’ Howard Rheingold’s term is ‘smart mobs’. It is the idea of technology enabled collaborations AND it is making us all smarter.

Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs): Collaboration Economics

We can see a new economic form beginning to emerge: accros a number of disciplines cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role and the central role of competition and survival of the fittest (Biology is war, in which only the fiercest survive. Businesses succeed only by defeating, destroying and dominating competition. Politics is about your side winning at all costs) shrinks a bit to make room.

The relationship between Communication, Media and Collective Action: Human communication, Media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for quite a long time. Now, the enabling cooperation-technologies are based on the internet: In the many-to-many era every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a market place AND evolution is speeding up from desktop to personal mobile supercomputers.

Collective action is about two types of Social dilemma’: (1) The prisoners dilemma c.q the ultimatum game and (2) The tragedy of the commons.

(1) The ultimatum game learnings: People from other cultures have radically different ideas of what is fair. Somehow the basis of our economic transactions can be influenced by our social institutions. 

(2) The tragedy of the commons (Gerard Harden): Humans will inevitably destroy any common pool resource in which people cannot be restrained from using it. In case after case humans destroy the commons that they depended on. But in a growing number of instances we see people able to escape from the prisoners dilemma (= fundamental, disruptive change of economic form). People are only prisoners as long as they consider themselves to be. People escaped by creating institutions for collective action. Among those institutions that worked, cooperative arrangements have moved from a periferral rol to a central role.

"Altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together".

New forms of cooperation create new forms of wealth. Jim Surwicki and Yochai Benkler describe how the new, next economic form is emerging (open source, new form of production, peer-to-peer production). Keep in mind that, in the past, new emerging forms of cooperation (enabled by new technologies) created new forms of weatlh. Conclusion: We may be moving into yet another economic form that is significally different from previous ones.

Cases: HP & IBM are open sourcing their software, Ely Lilli has created a market for solutions, Toyota treaths their suppliers as a network and trains their suppliers. Why? Because they learned that a certain kind of sharing is in their self interest. Google is enriching others not because of altruism, but as a way of enriching themselves. Ebay caused fundamental change (disruptive); it solved the prisoners dilemma and created a market where none would have excisted (by creating a feedback-mechanism that turns a prisoner’s dilemma into a insurance game).

We don’t know enough yet and are just beginning to discover what the basic principles are. This is just the beginning – we should and will soon learn more about the technologies of Cooperation & Sharing:

1. Easy to use

2. Enable connections

3. Open

4. Group forming

5. Self-instructions

6. Leverage self interest

We should start by developing maps of this cooperation-territory, so that we can talk about it accros disciplines. In the past, new ways of thinking helped alleviating suffering. What forms of of suffering could be alleviated and what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about the new forms of cooperation. Get the cooperation project started!      

Yochai Benkler: Open Source Economics

Clay Shirky, a prescient voice on the Internetx92s effects, argues that emerging technologies enabling loose collaboration will change the way our society works. Shirky shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning. Clay Shirky’s consulting focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.” His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC. Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York Universityx92s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches course named “Social Weather.”Shirky is author of Here Comes Everybody.