Technologies of Cooperation: A Map To a Toolkit
By Howard Rheingold, Thu Jun 02 11:00:00 EEST 2005

Just as the digital computer can be any machine you can program it to be and the Internet turns every desktop into a printing press, broadcasting station, community or market, the mobile Internet's unique capability is the power it gives people and machines to organize collective action.


Together with my colleagues Andrea Saveri and Kathi Vian, I've put together a report (PDF) and visual map of technologies of cooperation for publication by our sponsor, the Institute for the Future. Taken together with Mobile and Open: A Manifesto, this report and accompanying graphic map are offered as resources to the developers, designers, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, operators, service providers and activists who seek to use these new tools to alleviate suffering, create wealth, educate, liberate, create and inform.

Although we report about technologies, the power of these tools derives from the social practices they amplify -- specifically the ways people, machines and institutions can cooperate. These emerging digital technologies present new opportunities to change the way people work together to solve problems and generate wealth. Central to this class of cooperation-amplifying technologies are eight key clusters, each with distinctive contributions to scientific, economic, social and political forms of collective action:

Group-forming networks support the emergence of self-organized subgroups within a large-scale network, creating exponential growth of the network and shortening the social distance among members of the network.

Social software makes explicit, amplifies and extends many of the informal cooperative structures and processes that have evolved as part of human culture, providing the tools and awareness to guide people in intelligently constructing and managing these processes to specific ends.

Social mobile computing includes a cluster of technologies and principles that allow large or small groups of people -- even if they are strangers -- to act in a coherent and coordinated fashion in place and space, supported by information accessed in real time and real space.

Self-organizing mesh networks define architectural principles for building both tools and processes that grow from the edges without obvious limits, that distribute the burden of the infrastructure throughout the population of participants, and that establish the foundation for the emergence of swarm intelligence in systems of people and devices.

Community computing grids provide models for recovering currently squandered resources from distributed sources and for providing mutual security within a network of people and/or devices, supported by explicit choices about when and how to foster cooperation versus competition.

Peer production networks create a framework for volunteer communities to accomplish productive work in parallel. These potentially unbounded communities create new value by rapidly solving problems that would tax or stymie smaller workgroups; self-organization dramatically reduces coordination costs.

Social accounting tools suggest methods and structures to measure social connectedness and establish trust among large communities of strangers, building reputation along dimensions that are appropriate to a specific context and creating a visible history of individual behavior within a community.

Knowledge collectives model the structures, rules and practices for managing a constantly changing resource as a commons, for securing it against deliberate or accidental destruction and degradation, multiplying its productivity and for making it easily accessible for wide-ranging uses.

What we are witnessing today is the acceleration of a trend that has been building for thousands of years. When technologies like alphabets and Internets amplify the right cognitive or social capabilities, old trends take new twists and people build things that never could be built before. Over time, the number of people engaged in producing new things has grown from an elite group to a significant portion of the population; at the same time, the tools available to these growing populations have grown more powerful.

Today's technologies of cooperation are practical tools for organizing people and solving problems that we face right now. But they are also harbingers of new forms of social and economic organization -- forms that may help resolve some of the complex social dilemmas that confront the world. So each example of a cooperative technology is also a model for thinking about future social forms as well as future tools; each example embodies principles that can help us think more strategically.

Like any taxonomy, our eight categories are necessarily a bit arbitrary, and the boundaries between categories are sometimes blurred. And as tools evolve, the categories may shift in the future. In fact, as the cooperation commons grows and we apply some of these very tools to our analysis, we expect a much more robust folksonomy of cooperative technologies to emerge. For now, however, this analysis provides a way to think systematically about the tools and their strategic implications.

Each of these socio-technological clusters can be viewed not only as a template for design of cooperative systems, but also as tools people can use to tune organizations, projects, processes and markets for increased cooperation. This report is a map to a toolkit -- it's up to individuals and communities who know how to read the map and use the tools to take us to worthwhile new places.