But there is another, more subtle reason to stress the peer-network version of the Internet’s origins. We have an endless supply of folklore about heroic entrepreneurs who changed the world with their vision and their force of will. But as a society we lack master narratives of creative collaboration. When we talk about change being driven by mass collaboration, it’s often in the form of protest movements: civil rights or marriage equality. That’s a tradition worth celebrating, but it’s only part of the story. The Internet (and all the other achievements of peer networks) is not a story about changing people’s attitudes or widening the range of human tolerance. It’s a story, instead, about a different kind of organization, neither state nor market, that actually builds things, creating new tools that in turn enhance the way states and markets work.
TED Blog | In praise of cooperation without coordination: Clay Shirky at TEDGlobal 2012
“Look for where changes are happening; look on the margins,” he advises. “There are millions of projects on Github. Look around the edges and see people experimenting with the political ramifications of the system.” Someone uploaded the Wikileaks cables with software to read them, he says. Someone else uploaded a tool for detecting naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose. The audience is loving it.
I’ve been writing a lot in googledocs recently… the other week, I had a moment, I wrote a longish piece about something, shared it with a bunch of colleagues and they swarmed all over it with really smart suggestions… And the image of the mice from Bagpuss suddenly popped into my head… They weren’t meddling, they were mending. I think it’s something to do with the openness of it and the way that people can agree with each other. If one person says a sentence doesn’t work - it’s just their opinion, if a few do then it goes beyond personal and becomes fact…
Docs Demo: Master's edition
Edgar Allen Poe just wrote “I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat”. hmmm. this is a bit odd but fun
(From Jan): Spanish banking giant BBVA is switching its 110,000 staff to use Google’s range of enterprise software…. the deal can be seen as a breakthrough in corporate adoption… Banking - with its high security needs and strict regulations - was always considered to be one of the last industries to accept cloud-computing.
The bank would use Google applications like email, calendar, docs, chat, video conferencing and other collaboration tools to “achieve a cultural change” and get “the whole company working together” across the 26 countries where BBVA is based.
Ms Herranz said the project - with roll-out across all employees to be complete by the end of the year - was not about saving cost.
“The main goal is to promote innovation and making decisions and increase productivity. We are in a challenging market and need to make faster and more accurate decisions… and eliminate duplication,” Ms Herranz told the BBC.
81% of high-growth companies — those with more than 10% growth in 2011 — already using social-media tools said the tools have had a “significant” impact on growth and expansion. The data were based on a survey of 2,700 people in seven European countries.
“The better the performance of a company, the more likely they are to be using social-media tools,” said Allan Hyde, senior account director at Millward Brown.
Interestingly, it was senior executives, not young juniors, who were most likely to be using the tools. Nearly three-quarters of those using social-media tools at least once a week for business (as opposed to personal) purposes were from senior roles, compared with 49% of those in more junior roles
Michael Nielsen: Open science now! | Video on TED.com
In 2009 Field’s medallist Tim Gowers decided to experiment with crowdsourcing a solution to a difficult, previously unsolved, mathematical problem, in something he called the Polymath Project. He posted the problem to his blog along with his initial ideas on solving. Within 37 days, 27 different people had posted 800 substantive comments containing 170k words…. and the problem was solved. ”Gowers described the process as being to ordinary research, as driving is to pushing a car”.
GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.
On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.
And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.
the 1 millionth user of our application and the 100 millionth research document upload to our open research catalog. (Mendeley stats as of end July 2011)
Multi-disciplinary is a really key missing part of society, whether you’re talking about science or the economy or any of these things. We’ve gotten so good at getting deep and being more and more specialized about a smaller and smaller thing that now we’ve got so many people who are really, really smart but don’t know how to talk, let alone build anything together.
A physicist and a chemist and an architect are only going to work together really well when they’re building something. You can have them sit around a table and argue but they’ll really only be talking across each other. The minute you try and build something together it becomes rigorous.
the killer app on Google Plus is more about work than play. Google Docs is now available live over Hangouts, making live, face-to-face collaboration possible on the Web for free.
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With screensharing and a shared sketchpad, and especially with Docs, Google Plus is now a platform for making stuff together, face-to-face. It’s the first Plus feature that’s categorically different than anything Facebook can do
the company claims more than 80% of Fortune 100 companies use Dropbox, either officially or, ahem, not.
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Houston likes to bring up one story from an astronomer. Instead of having to spend three hours each morning transferring images from the telescope to staffers among Finland, Boston and New Mexico, his team of star watchers use Dropbox to keep large photo images from their telescope synced among locations at all times.“For them, Dropbox is the difference between starting work at 9 AM versus 12 PM,”
Mendeley is now indexing 60 million research papers and now has in the region of 700,000 users
in my “end of the office” piece I report on entpreneurs who found that certain types of work are really hard — or perhaps impossible — to do well remotely. One example is doing a big huge rethink of a major part of your business: Several folks told me that if they wanted to tear down a central database and rebuild it, you need everyone in a room together. I know people who’ve redesigned magazines, a task that would have been unfathomable if everyone weren’t in the same conference room. As the science on virtual collaboration emerges, we may find some commonalities between types of work that are best done face to face, and those that work well remotely
