[ox-en] Sharing / Cooperation / Collaboration / Collectivism
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:06:42 +0200
Hi list!
Last week (7 days ago) Stefan Meretz wrote:
Btw: Kevin Kelly used the term "socialism" too -- crazy:
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism
Well, really an interesting article. Indeed, very Oekonuxian in
spirit.
What I found most original was the distinction Kevin made between
* Sharing
* Cooperation
* Collaboration
* Collectivism
I quote the most interesting parts here:
* Sharing
The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The
number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is
astronomical, but it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of
photos taken with a digital camera are shared in some fashion. [...]
Sharing is the mildest form of socialism, but it serves as the
foundation for higher levels of communal engagement.
* Cooperation
When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it
produces results that emerge at the group level. Not only have
amateurs shared more than 3 billion photos on Flickr, but they have
tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Others in the
community cull the pictures into sets.
[...]
* Collaboration
Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements
of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source
software projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these
endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality
products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of
thousands of members.
[...]
Of course, there's nothing particularly socialistic about
collaboration per se. But the tools of online collaboration support
a communal style of production that shuns capitalistic investors
and keeps ownership in the hands of the workers, and to some extent
those of the consuming masses.
* Collectivism
While cooperation can write an encyclopedia, no one is held
responsible if the community fails to reach consensus, and lack of
agreement doesn't endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a
collective, however, is to engineer a system where self-directed
peers take responsibility for critical processes and where
difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by
all participants.
[...]
Well, this quotation really cuts out a lot. Read the whole article for
the rest.
Grüße
Stefan
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