Resources and Links Related to Simple Collectives
This is the zone of the market place (or bazaar), the digital on-line environments, and spontaneously forming crowds. It’s not really a new space. Markets have existed for millennia. While there is often an entity (often formed of traders themselves) that monitors the trading and exchanges and sets some basic rules, these rules are nearly all enablers so that the spontaneous interaction of agents exchanging value with one another can proceed without confusion or unnecessary impediment.
Collaborative work in this arena is characterized by more and more control shifting to agents, or the individual participants, while digital tools and simple rules serve as enablers and connectors. The Internet-based versions of this zone let people work together on projects from a distance (remote) and at their convenience instead of all at the same time (asynchronous). Events take on a more fluid and discontinuous feel.
What follows are links to resources and additional information about Simple Collectives.
Currently there are materials related to:
Theory
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams first published in December 2006. It explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration (also called peer production) and open-source technology such as wikis to be successful.
Mass collaboration could change way companies operate: The "company," as we've known it for almost a century, is about to go the way of vinyl albums, floppy disks and perked coffee.
Open Innovation is a term promoted by Henry Chesbrough, a professor and executive director at the Center for Open Innovation at Berkeley. The central idea behind open innovation is that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (i.e. patents) from other companies. In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm's business should be taken outside the company (e.g., through licensing, joint ventures, spin-offs). In contrast, closed innovation refers to processes that limit the use of internal knowledge within a company and make little or no use of external knowledge. Some companies promoting open innovation include Procter & Gamble, InnoCentive, and IBM.
Co-Working is an emerging phenomenon which first showed up around 2005 in San Francisco. There are now co-working environments showing up around the world. Co-Working is based on a few principles including collaboration, openness, community, accessibility, and sustainability. In addition to the wiki link provided there is also a co-working blog.
Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. Other names for prediction markets include information markets, decision markets, idea futures, event derivatives, and virtual markets.
Research on Collective Decision Making
What do riots, stampedes, Kool-Aid cults and black market Tuesday have in common? They are all collective decisions. These failed flashes of human potential can now be made successful through a variety of ignorant aggregation systems. Collective decision making systems utilize non-confrontational computer interfaces to facilitate the appropriate combination of the diverse bits of information and insight contained within us all. Here’s to white market Fridays!
Collective Decision Making Systems and Prediction Markets by Marko Rodriguez. I’m going to talk about Dynamically Distributed Democracy (DDD), which is an accurate way of determining what the collective’s values are. It is an example of collective decision making using computers to support the process.
A Survey of Web Based Collective Decision Making Systems: A collective decision making system uses an aggregation mechanism to combine the input of individuals to generate a decision. The decisions generated serve a variety of purposes from governance rulings to forecasts for planning. The Internet hosts a suite of collective decision making systems, some that were inconceivable before the web. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of collective decision making systems into which we place seven principal web-based tools. This taxonomy serves to elucidate the state of the art in web-based collective decision making as well as to highlight opportunities for innovation.
Communities of Practice: The concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations. It refers as well to the stable group that is formed from such regular interactions.
Collaborative software is software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals. Collaborative software is the basis for computer supported cooperative work.
Computer-supported collaboration (CSC) research focuses on technology that affect groups, organizations communities and societies, e.g. voice mail, text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working relationships. As net technology increasingly supported a wide range of recreational and social activities, consumer markets expanded the user base, more and more people were able to connect online to create what researchers have called a Computer Supported Cooperative World which includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music" (from CSCW 2004).
Massively Distributed Collaboration: The term massively distributed collaboration was coined by Mitchell Kapor, in a presentation at UC Berkeley on 2005-11-09, to describe an emerging activity of wikis and electronic mailing lists and blogs and other content-creating virtual communities online.
Processes
Ask 500 People: A simple polling application based on The Wisdom of Crowds.
InnoCentive is an "open innovation" company that takes research and development problems in a broad range of domains such as Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Chemistry, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Business, frames them as "challenge problems", and opens them up for anyone to solve them. It gives cash awards for the best solutions to solvers who meet the challenge criteria.[1]
The simExchange is the prediction game for video games. Gamers predict the sales of console hardware and upcoming video games by playing a fantasy stock market.
The Virtual Stock Exchange: Welcome To Virtual Stock Exchange, A Free Online Trading Game From MarketWatch.
Popular Science Predictions Exchange: Welcome to the PPX, the first place to bet on the future of science and technology. It's easy and free: Log on, and we'll give you POP$250,000 in our virtual PopSci Dollars. Use that money to buy propositions you think are likely to happen. If other traders also want to buy, that proposition's price will go up, and you'll make PopSci bucks. Expand your portfolio with bets on energy, space, consumer technology and extreme science, and compete against other players for prizes and bragging rights.
Flickr: We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos.
YouTube: Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.
Collaborative Software: This is a list of collaborative software (or list of groupware) applications.
