How collaboration might work

From espians

Well... Mamading thinks we need a process of acculturation, and this certainly parallels my work ethic. I've heard so many people rabbiting on about collaboration, and yet I don't see much of it about.

To start, some caveats that enable an open-minded approach:

• we are all self-organising, the entire society complete with governments, economies, businesses, buildings, all of it, is self-organised
• we are particularly interested in mechanisms of self-organisation that are within the human time-scale, ie effecting change before we die
• language will betray us at every turn (eg "mechanism" "collaboration")... we need to be sufficiently forgiving of the use of any particular words to appreciate the concepts these words allude to... we should not fall into the pit of defining, nor inventing new terminology either, unless playfully, of course :)
• the process of social engagement, the collaborative tango, is happening; it is a live thing, in flux, and our talking about it is one step removed from it... what is important is that we always remember we are talking about something, which is not as important as the actual doing of it...

Enough warnings, petitions, apologies, blaaaa...

• appreciate that the central thing of importance here is people... they are the ones being, thinking, doing... right now...
• invite people to express their intentions, unilaterally, without any fear of thought-police of any kind...
• align yourself with intentions that seem to echo yours... confluence
• consider needs at the highest level, eg for the world ecologically, for animal life perhaps, for humanity, and let that inform intentions

How does this translate into a practical process by which we learn how to collaborate? Well, thankfully, everyone I have met so far wrt 24weeks have all the awareness, skills, and time to make things happen... the trick is, we're not quite confluencing. Mainly because of the problems that explain how networked collaborations fail. We are each of us developing the skills, whether as Geeks with open-source projects, as academics with wikipedia or second life (?), as people playing around with networks of our own. The trick is, to inhibit the mind's propensity to think either/or, to avoid the pressure imposed by traditional politico-economic structures, and to keep an open mind :) We will certainly go through plenty of failures, but when it works... well, you know.

Do we need something more concrete than this? Well, use the wiki, until the Espra system is up and running, especially the Today facility which enables everyone to see what everyone else is doing at a glance. We are going to get 1000 people at the WTF 7.1 not through centralisation and pushing/selling anything, but rather inviting people in, listening to them, and helping them work out a way for them to contribute usefully to 24weeks. If people like the way they are being respected and valued, I hope they will want to recommend it to their friends, and hopefully the network grows. Organically. And potentially exponentially.

The best animal analogy for collaboration I can think of is flocking. Flocking is an emergent phenomenon. Collaboration is too. We can't concentrate on it too much, because then it becomes a goal in itself, rather than a state of social flux.

The best human analogy is driving. How we get about from place to place, how we join the traffic in a road, then leave it, without any request-report, no bureaucracy, just a bunch of monkeys all driving around somehow completing their own ideas, and somehow using the same system. Well, the internet should be that. It allows each and everyone one of us on this planet, to get on, use it, and somehow realise our intentions.

If historians place a lot of emphasis on roads as being central for civilisations (Roman roads, the Chinese standardisation of the wheel-axle gauge), how much more important can we consider the formation/design of the virtual network?

We are living in very interesting times, ladies and gentlemen, and it is for each and every one of us to be as aware of this as we can be, personally, so that the emergent consequence of our individual choices, might result in a much more favourable global future... sustainable... fair... whatever words you wish to apply to your own vision/dream/ideal...

related

• how 24weeks will fail -- a companion page to this one...
• boids and music -- how boids can provide us with a way of seeing music, and hence see our attention...
• realtime os -- what rules might we as individuals pursue to enable a confluence at a meeting, or to realise a project...
• multi-agent modelling of society-stream -- a visual representation of people to show crystalisation of hierarchy, network, and social experiments