Net Smart: Chapter 4

Chapter 4, Digital Know-how: The Arts and Sciences of Collective Intelligence, was an engaging chapter. Touching on many of the same topics as Clay Shirky did in his book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" (which I thoroughly enjoyed), Rheingold discusses collaboration from the theoretical to the real life use of wikis. I was expecting to see a quote or two from Shirky, but there were none. Hmm...

The section about mass collaboration explained that as humans, we are wired to collaborate. He reviews self-interest vs. collective good and the tragedy of the commons. Elinor Ostrom's work on "institutions of collective action" was particularly interesting, in that she figured out what rules need to be in place for the collective governance and use of shared resources to succeed.

Himmelman's schema was well explained: Networking has low risk; coordination means that everyone must share info for mutual benefit; cooperation means sharing info and resources, and modifying activities; an collaboration means sharing responsibility and resources to take collective action towards a common goal.



Cooperation theory outlined the following:
1. Balance retribution and forgiveness
2. Contribute publicly
3. Reciprocate when someone does you a favor
4. Look for ways to seek a sense of shared group identity
5. Introduce people and networks to each other
6. When progress is blocked by social dilemmas, create institutions for collective action
7. Punish cheating, but not too drastically

The section on gaming explained World of Warcraft, something I'd heard of but never understood. Joi Ito gamed himself right into a big job at MIT without a college degree. Wow. You can barely teach undergrads anywhere without a Ph.D.

The section about Crowdsourcing reminded me about a dilemma that Shirky raised. All of the work-hours and resources spent on locating Jim Gray...if Jim hadn't been a computer scientist with connections at NASA and Google, would he have had access to all of that? When Joe-the-Plumber's son gets lost at sea, does Google provide data, does NASA provide satellite photos, do Amazon engineers divide half a million photos for 12,000 volunteers to review? Who gets access to the crowd's time, labor, knowledge, expertise? The in-crowd of techies?

The sites spot.us, kickstarter.com, inuka.org and kiva.org are cool. He mentioned DonorsChoose.org just enough to interest me but not enough to explain it. I'll have to check it out.

I expected to be bored in the section on wikis, but I was wrong. My wheels started spinning about how I could use wikis in the classroom. And then the part about collaborative government, excellent! And then the part about the patent office. I'm going to call my friend at the FDA who recently told me about the huuuge backlog of paperwork they have in the office. I wonder if a game like the DNA folding, or UK's expense receipts, or a wiki would work....wheels spinning....

It feels like there are solutions waiting to happen with crowdsourcing, gaming, and collaborative technology.