Cooperation research project

Superordinate goals

Project description

The Cooperation Project, a collaboration between the Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold, proposes to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. We do this by compiling and synthesizing current knowledge, mapping the outlines of the emerging field, convening meetings of the best minds in relevant disciplines, and encouraging ongoing discourse, research, and practice.

• add something to this about the involvement of an open, volunteer collective (the list) aimed at sharing, exchanging and building knowledge (i.e. the commons).

Draft revision The Cooperation Project, a collaboration between the Institute for the Future, Howard Rheingold and an open, volunteer collective proposes to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. We do this by exchanging, synthesizing and compiling current knowledge, mapping the outlines of the emerging field, convening meetings of the best minds in relevant disciplines, and encouraging ongoing discourse, research, and practice.

Howard:

• The Cooperation Project is nothing official. It's an umbrella name for efforts I've tried to get started around understanding and applying cooperation theory. Andrea Saveri has been my partner in trying to get funding, do research, publish findings, teach courses, convene workshops, and Institute for the Future has funded much of that. At present we have no funding through IFTF. Nobody "owns" the project in any legal sense, although IFTF and I are free to use it in any way we see fit, and of course we have made our material freely available online. The Google Group and the website were started as a seed for a community of interest. Where it goes from here is up to us.

Tagline drafting

Cooperation Project, ...

Cooperation Commons, ...

Pre-Publication Archive

An open access, pre-publication archive for journal articles relating to cooperation studies.

• For example, see http://arxiv.org/ - 'Open access to 424,070 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology' - run out of Cornell university. By uploading one's articles post peer review, but pre publication, an open access commons of cooperation oriented and otherwise proprietary journal articles may be grown. This would help us to attract publishing scientists, academics and researchers who have an interest in cultivating a shared commons which helps shape this new perspective we are advocating.
  • 'Take a look through our statements of purpose on the cooperation commons site and our introductions to our publications and you can cobble together a draft. I will be happy to review. Keeping it short is a virtue.' -- Howard

Journal of Cooperation Studies

An open access, (open?) peer reviewed online 'Journal of Cooperation Studies' or something of the like.

For example, see http://www.re-public.gr/en/ (within which myself and Paul Hartzog were recently published). Providing a forum for and stimulating the publication of peer reviewed articles could help shape a collectively created conception of the emergent domain of cooperation studies. This could also significantly advance our activities within the general research domain.

• Need to develop a statement of scope (could be linked to above statement of purpose for pre-pub archive.
  • commons studies
  • economic games
  • cultural evolution studies
  • biological evolution studies (group selection etc)
  • distributed computation
  • peer production
  • collective intelligence
  • global brain, hive/social mind

• In physics there are short publications (Physical Review Letters) that permit rapid publication of ideas, work in progress, intermediate results, etc. in addition to the many other publications of longer papers, experimental results, etc. Submissions, being short, might also get a faster peer-review turnaround that might be more easily managed. And if the Letters also had an online commenting facility then the authors (and the community) could get rapid feedback. The reviews would need to be in the spirit of helping authors and others to clarify and understand the proffered ideas. I think one important req't for any online peer-reviewed publication is long-term permanent availability. -- Bill

Possible action goals

• present Cooperation Commons concepts in open conferences, like BarCamp
  • how to present this project and how to direct people to some place where they will easily be able to participate (a commons-style resource for doing this)

Test theory through action

• create new ways to engage this project through applications
• provide a means to contribute feedback about the way that we are applying what we're learning - in ways that are useful for the project
• create some sort of repository or place to document how we are applying this knowledge in our activities in different ways

I think it would be extremely fruitful/useful to see the all of the people present here and on the http://research.iftf.net/newcommons project document how they are applying theories and concepts, either related to the scope of what this project is covering, or based on specific work output by people in this project that is related (for example, "Panarchy" applications, Collaboration or P2P concept applications, Howard et al's paper on Rapid Decision Making, Cooperation In Business, etc)

I've been inspired by the simple and quick format of the "pattern template" See:

• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PatternTemplate
• http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/docs/patterns-nutshell.html#Pattern_Elements
• http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/docs/patterns-intro.html#PatternElements

A similar set of Elements could describe patterns of cooperation studies theory application. I believe that a lot of us are applying different parts of the body of theory beign studied by this project. Documenting these concepts as useful "patterns" and releasing the infromation as an Open Access knowledge commons could help people recreate successes. We could also document cooperation application "Anti patterns".

I propose that this exist in addition to theoretical exploration. The elements could exist as a simple form to be filled in, perhaps with suggestive questions that help users contextualize their input.

There could also be a place for users to upload related media, such as pictures/images/diagrams, or movies/audio that document what they are talking about. There could even be a "mini-blog" with RSS feed attatched to each entry, for users to update the changes and evolution of the application.