Mark Elliot, I respect you as founder of this wiki, and it is you PhD project. A very long time ago I wondered why do people collaborate. I studied, and graduated. You write "there are virtually no general theories of collaboration in existence". How many general theories are needed to contradict it, just one, or ten, or hundred?
Human behavior - which is mostly collaborative behavior - is studied in several academic studies, for example sociology, psychology, antropology, social-psychology, and economics. And each field of study wil provide you with a full range of general theories of collaboration. Dedalus 15:43, 4 Oct 2005 (UTC)
What's the main difference?[]
Between cooperating and collaborating? My dictionary just says: cooperate: work together, collaborate: work jointly. Ok, you'll say, I should change dictionary... But I'd like to know what's the main difference between the two, in order to be able to help developing this wiki... --Let's 15:30, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
Missed this page some how![]
Dunno how i did it, but missed this post...
I do recognise that there are many theories of collaboration, however by saying that there are virtually no general theories, I mean to say that there are few if any theories that span more than several fields of research. This may be due to inherent qualities of collaboration (in that it is context specific or something of the like), however I personally don't feel this is the case. Rather, I feel that collaboration has not received enough trans-disciplinary attention to generate a broad enough, yet focused enough theory to account for the core qualities and processes of collaboration in any and every situation in which it occurs.
One reason that I feel justified in saying this is that there isn't enough consensus regarding the definition of the word collaboration, outside of specific disciplines, in order to satisfactorily differentiate this form of human activity from others such as cooperation - as Let's says above.
However I'd love to be proven wrong because then I would have a theoretical framework to build on in my own research which focuses more on the convergence of stigmergy and collaboration - see Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work.
Thanks for the contributions! Mark Elliott 08:01, 26 August 2006 (UTC)