Notes From Intro To Cooperation Theory With Howard Reingold

These are my very rough unedited notes for the Cooperation Theory collaborative learning session at Howard Reingold University. The session was hosted by Howard Reingold (author of Smart Mobs) as part of his mindamp series. Howard may do a full length cooperation theory course in the summer… that would be exciting!

Social Action

People looking down at their phones in Japan long before us… it got Howard thinking.

• In the Philipines people texted to organize demonstration to bring down Joseph Lastrada.
• Collective action is not always a pretty thing… riots in africa etc. People who share a grievance can organize quickly – non-violent or violent.
• Election in Korea (see oh my news).
• Madrid, dozen copies of a photo in email sent to Howard many times. Bombings in the railroads blamed on basque separatists. Social tech enabled organization tipped the election.
• 20,000 highschool students organize anti-immigration deportation rally in LA over myspace.
• Chilean society. Penguin revolution, 15-18 year old students. Photoblogs and youtube. 700,000 people. changed the dialog about education.
• SMS organized protests against Denmark in Syria and Egypt, around the mohamad cartoons.
• Moldova, violent action. Social media and mobile phones.

Open Source

• Not organized by companies
• People who didn’t know eachother
• Not working for money
• Make technology that challenges software companies

Market Places

• Ebay provides a little info that creates enough trust to overcome prisoner’s dilemna (which should not happen theoretically).
• Think cycle… idea marketplace for design students. Huge success in designing colera dehydration unit.

Swarm computing collectives.

• Seti at home. Screen saver loads, then processes outerspace data. For a while this was the most powerful super computer.
• Folding @ Home does something similar for cancer analysis. It’s an intractible problem, but can tackle the same way by aggregating computing power. (Distributed.net)

Disaster Response

• South east asian blog after tsunami
• Same after katrina
• Now first responders are all over the world
• Jim Gray, searched for him after he disapeared. 12,000 images gone through by mechanical turk. He was never found but this was organized in 24 hours.
• 1/4 million dollars raised for drinking water over twitter

Origins

• Success of colaborative hunting of mastadons, lead to human adaptions for collaboration.
• Large scale aggriculture instigated large human settlements, and writing for accounting
• Guttenberg was an entrepeneur – had amassed lots of metal. Not much known but had law suites with creditors. The printing press allowed Luther’s writings to be read at home.
• Science relied on genius’s coming along but aggregation of observations allows a new kind of collective knowledge to emerge.
• Cycles of information overload inspire reactions to them.
• Revolutions in europe were literate revolutions. The federalist papers were letters to news papers.
• Literate populations were enabled by these technologies to do things they were not able to do before

Social Dilemmas: 3 Mythic narratives

• Prisoners’s dilemma. Simplified into a grid. Matrix of permutations for 2 priorities betraying or not betraying the other. Another interesting one called the ultimatum game. It also turn’s out that sense of fairness (50 / 50 split) is cultural!

• The tragedy of the commons. Many desserts were overgrazed grass lands. Elanor Ostrom studied a lot of water sharing arrangements and found that there were a small but regular proportion of people who were able to sustain their use of resources.

• Public goods. Elanor Ostrom Found 8 design principles that are needed for success. She said institutions for collective action can define their way out of the prisoners dilemma. She won the nobel prize in economics last year. Matrix of Rivalrous, Non-Rivelrous (these are about finite goods); with Excludable, Non-Excludable (these are about access).

Biology originally did not see cooperation as being a large part of evolution. But this has been changing.
Altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together.

Technologies of Cooperation & Sharing Economies: The cooperation Project

Chat Notes

• Couchsurfing.com takes advantage of axelrod’s 3 necessary conditions.
• Herzog cave of forgotten dreams interesting

Collaborative Learning

Gregor McNish: Boardgamegeek.com. Simple dynamics that lead to rich game play. Lots of clubs in many cities where people gather for these.
Howard: what games are interesting (knows about public goods and prisoner’s dilemna)
Subzombie: Dixit was really fun and involved very cool rules
Vahid: in video games, there’s a trend of games that enfasize cooperation more and more

What about markets for ideas? Ideagoras. Was talking about inocentive. There was a gold company that had lots of mines and geologic data that was going out of business. They published their data and asked where should they drill… they received answers that allowed them to collect much more gold. IBM made a patent commons that made their patents available as long as others published their improvements to these patents… this is very much the open source model.

Yochai Benkler – Open Source economics

Is collective action more socialist or anarchistic in nature? Howard: It’s not socialalism. Socialism is centralized and coerced. Collective action is distributed but it is not without hierarchy although it devolves to individual decision makeing. It is not coerced.

Why do open source software developers contribute. Their motivations in order have been collected as:

• Learning
• Developing a reputation (that can be converted to money)
• Working towards an altruistic aim
• Sticking it to microsoft

Steven weber wrote the success of open source. Cooperationcommons.com gives a good 1 page summary of this.

Addtional link notes by participants here