Collaboration Series (PART 1) : Birds of a feather

by StSanto on December 11, 2008

“There is no greater crime than to stand between a man
and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.” – Henry Ward Beecher.

One of the key factors in information management on Web 2.0 has been the sharing and collective operation of resources . In order to understand this aspect , it is important to reflect on a very curious and persistent paradox in social evolution which has been the continual effort to institutionalize when the innate tendency is to randomize . Persistent as it may seem, this paradox has given way to a new trend on the web where the very same concept of institunializing has given way to a movement towards decentralization of information , to sharing and computing across groups rather a niche class of people . This series on collaboration reflects on this current trend and the impact it has on various fields .

Collaboration is the sharing of computation resources and data across groups of cooperating communities which affects the relationships and activities of participating individuals . Interestingly, the concept of collaboration has been around even before the Web 2.0 buzz . Sharing of thoughts and lifestyles through photoshare , chatting and e-mail programs has been around for a long time . With these technologies however, information management was set into an institutional hierarchy which had a lot of unique attributes; three of these attributes being generic and broadly covering its most visible characteristics: -

  1. A need to maintain dedicated personnel for various stages of management to sustain the hierarchy.
  2. A significant investment in the formation of a structure ranging from legal, financial, human resources etc.
  3. A dedicated class of people holding all stakes to the information updation and creation. Linguists maintaining dictionaries, journalists maintaining news feeds , scientists maintaining research information et al.

The move towards collaboration has significantly distorted these axioms on how information is controlled if not completely obliterated them . Today there are citizen journalists providing live feed coverage of current news , passionate photographers sharing stunning images on the web, groups of volunteers dedicating their spare time to find coordinates of plane crash , “wizkids” sharing conclusive reviews of latest gadgets in the market, engineers sharing their work online, artists canvassing their art through online portfolios .

This move has shattered the very same concepts of evolution which have been considered sacrosanct- competition , isolation of information and henceforth isolation of power, system of intelligentsia, system to govern the intelligentsia, system to integrate the various governing bodies of intelligentsia …  Today every person connected to the web is a contributor as well as consumer; every machine can double up as a news broadcast station, a music school, a flea market, a karate dojo or a groove train .

Great ! So now we are onto something . But what exactly is the scope of collaboration ?

Today it can be seen across a stunning variety of applications and fields . Business processes have been greatly facilitated with shared resources like calendars , task lists, planned milestones, projections and even popularity management . Physical deployment and installment of software and websites have given way to SaaS based applications and  PaaS based online development environments. Today documents can be edited and shared at one go(Adobe Buzzword) , milestones can be set by different people at the same time without being in the same room or even in the same continent (Basecamp), images can be shared by friends (Flickr,Picasa etc.), satellite images can be analyzed by individual members of a group to pinpoint coordinates, computing power can be shared across groups of computers to research life outside earth (seti@home) and encyclopedias can be shared and maintained by everyone (Wikipedia).

Having said that, is it all rosy or does it have a drawback?
Unfortunately it does. Quiet contrary to the what sociologists refer to as The wisdom of Crowds , the drawback of collaboration is that in order to maintain this network , the individual elements have to maintain a mutual independence of thought processes to avoid cyclic circulaton of information. If the individual elements fail to do so , then one bright idea will continue to circulate without further build up or progress and that goes right against the foundation on which informations systems are built.

All this boils down to the central idea that a community can make things work only if it has equally passionate and bright individual members instead of one genius or one bright talent.It will be interesting to watch how this system reverse institutionalizes the existing governing bodies and flattens out hierarchy in the future . But till then ..

’nuff said.

  • Jeffery Toh
    Hi Kaashif, I really like your post and your ideas. I am really looking forward to your future post but I do hope that it will be in a more layman terms? I realized I have to flip my dictionary a few times before i reach realization of what you are saying in some sentences. Love your post, keep it up.
  • kaashif
    Having said that I would like to add that the scope of collaboration here is mainly restricted to information technology and information technology enabled services; not on governance and managerial areas . I am staying put on my resolve to be an absolute techie in my discussions and nothing beyond it . :-)
  • kaashif
    Thanks for the feedback Anol .
    Being the "preface" post to a series of posts, the main purpose here has been to bring out the questions and features of collaboration as such without delving into details . Its a trade off I had to make between lucid and abstruse . The subsequent posts will refer to a case study model of approach wherein application of collaboration in different verticals and fields of specializations will be explained in greater detail w.r.t the aspects and features mentioned here .

    But I will nevertheless make a humble effort here to clear a bit of fog as I am no horror fiction writer who wants readers to be at the edge of their seats before the next post . I doubt collaboration will aid in that as much as sex and violence will . :-)

    The collaboration I have mentioned here is a concept which should not be confused with collaborative software . Collaboration is a broad idea that enables technology as you have rightly pointed out. The move towards decentralization may sound utopian especially with time critical and high impact areas of application such as health care and government intel unless it has a Trusted space like you mentioned . These will be covered in detail on a case by case analysis in following posts that will make the point clearer.

    The concept of collective intelligence and brains on the network is stressed in the post mainly because of the levels of individuality that are maintained within the cohesive effort in spite of having a common task and objective . This is probably not a counter point but still not a direct corollary either of the Wisdom of Crowds as in the combines effort is far more impactful than summation of individual efforts . Having said that , it is mainly because of the necessity to retain unique individual identity in order to be more productive and avoid redundant circulation of data . So , it is collective and not connected intelligence .

    Regarding the prospects of reverse institutionalization , I presume I should have made it clearer that although the tendency is to randomize , the move is towards decentralization and not an elimination of a controlling framework . A specification of a picture frame to resist the canvas needs to be well defined with a few implementations towards this direction being made by organizations which have emphasized "self motivation" and "ownership" ideals but that does not exclude the fact that even if the film is made , written and acted by people within the cast, there still is a need for a director behind the camera to overlook how the projection of the story will be and how it will shape into a full featured movie.

    I do not boldly assume I have answered all the questions but I presume I have set a base so as to know what to expect as clarifications from subsequent posts .
  • Kaashif - good post, but little too broad of a scope. Is it from a POV of enterprise? How collaboration help them? Or - is it an narrative on the subject of inclination of human interactions towards random and serendipitous conversation. Or is it about 'Wisdom of crowds"?
    To me - it's nothing to do with technology. Rather technology is an enabler only. Conversation between the Many and the Many is the Darwinian Creative Process that delivers Emergence. For the right Conversations to happen - you need a Trusted Space. A Trusted Space must be Peer to Peer. Extreme power differences prevent conversation and hence emergence. Hence traditional bureaucracies have profound challenges in coping unless they find ways of opening up the space safely inside to allow for peer to peer.

    At its most basic level, the wisdom of crowds — let’s call it WOC, so I don’t have to type as much — means that the aggregated thought and knowledge of thousands or millions of people can be smarter than trained individual experts.

    The WOC has been around forever — it’s what democratic elections try to tap into. But the Net takes it to a whole new level. “The Internet provides a mechanism to get lots of diverse opinions and aggregate it in a quick and cost-effective way,” Surowiecki tells me.

    So if a company can use the Net to tap the collected intelligence of its employees, the employees will make better decisions than the CEO. IBM, Google and others have tried this. Wikipedia, written and edited by tens of thousands of unpaid contributors, should be better than an encyclopedia written and edited by specialists. News sites such as Digg, which lets users vote stories to the front page, should surface the best stuff more effectively than professional editors.

    Except it doesn’t always work that way. Pointing specifically at Wikipedia, Lauren Weinstein of the People for Internet Responsibility says that the Net has propagated a “basic fallacy that a wisdom-of-crowds approach could ever work, even theoretically.”

    Also - another question - “Connected” or “Collective” intelligence? The distinction between groups and networks. Groups require unity, networks require diversity. Groups require coherence, networks require autonomy. Groups require privacy or segregation, networks require openness. Groups require focus of voice, networks require interaction. The group I am with right now is very intent on being a group. That doesn’t interest me. I have no wish to lose my identity and my freedom, my empowerment. Because a group is subject to this very objection - backlash, groupthink, the works. But a network is not.

    Will wait for the next round...
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