mark-elliott.net

I’m in the process of migrating my phd from the wiki where I wrote it, to this site. I thought I’d write a post for each chapter as I get them up. You can find more out about my phd here, or in the links in the banner. So, here’s the first chapter!

This initial chapter sets the scene - how does a long time artist / composer move into the world of online collaboration? Easy:

• creative exploration + digital media + collaborative practice + research + synthesis = stigmergic mass collaboration.

Here’s an excerpt:

Having grown up in Alaska spending a great deal of time in small aircraft (my first fly-in camping trip was at the age of 3 months), I grew up accustomed to seeing and thinking about vast and variegated spaces from an aerial perspective (see figure 0.0). Later in life, I came to realise that my thinking had been dramatically shaped by this —I still experience a strangely disorienting feeling in new places if I don’t know what the terrain looks like from the sky. This desire for aerial, meta, holistic and encompassing understandings has stayed with me throughout my life, evolving in its application and complexity.

I made a brief stop in Howard Rheingold’s beautiful garden office while passing through San Francisco in early July ‘08. He interviewed me for his vlog on the topic of stigmergy and the recent City of Melbourne wiki my company CollabForge designed and developed. (Too bad I look as exhausted as I was - traveling with 2yr old twins is way harder than I ever imagined!) Afterwards we went on a splendid walk on Mt. Tamalpais - great views (despite smoke from forest fires) of the SF bay.

click to watch on Howard’s site

I was recently asked to publish my phd abstract on HamiltonInstitute.com which you can now find here. This is a great site hosting a raft of interesting and diverse articles, ranging from “Are Familiar Faces Always Recognized?“, “The Ethics of Internet Privacy in Employment“, “Toward a ‘Korean Model’ of Development“, “Fuel Cells: Batteries of the Future?“.

The Hamilton Institute describes itself as:

..a not-for-profit organization overseen by the International High IQ Society. The Hamilton Institute’s mission is to provide a platform for amateur scholars to present their ideas and publish their work in a formal setting.

This is a great project to be able to contribute to and an excellent use of the web’s publishing capacity!

Anthony D. Williams, coauthor of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, recently blogged my phd dissertation.

The post highlights the fact that Wikinomics was in fact the first text published on the topic of mass collaboration (as far as my research could uncover). It also highlights my criticism of the book – which must be taken in context, being that of a phd literature review. In this context each work must be critically reviewed with the objective of highlighting how your own work is unique and required.
The post highlights the fact that Wikinomics was in fact the first text published on the topic of mass collaboration (as far as my research could uncover). It also highlights my criticism of the book – which must be taken in context, being that of a phd literature review. In this context each work must be critically reviewed with the objective of highlighting how your own work is unique and required.

To this end, my critique of Wikinomics is mainly centered on the usage of the term ‘collaboration’, in that the book does not provide a definition as to what it means when using the term. This is of course not unusual (unless you’re writing a phd!) as most of us tend to feel fairly confident that we know what the word means. After all, a reader can always go to the dictionary if they feel the need, can’t they?

As an artist who has worked collaboratively for many years, I was quite surprised to learn that there was no ‘general theory of collaboration‘ or anything of the like to refer to when writing a phd on mass collaboration. Rather, having spent many years producing works which required creative engagement with others in the most intimate and complex of manners, I was forced to rely upon dictionary definitions, which were far too broad to use in the context of a phd. This lead me to do a fairly comprehensive investigation into the etymology of the term collaboration, as well as to interrogate the meanings I discovered. I found that what was once meant by collaboration – working with someone on the creation of a literary work – has modulated (esp. post Internet) to anything and everything that requires more than one person to achieve it – e.g. ‘collaborative filtering’ or ‘collaborative bookmarking’.

But are these newer references really collaboration, or are they yet another collective process? In my own experience (also supported by the etymology of collaboration) creative production (in the sense of artistry) is a necessary component of collaboration. This lead me to an investigation of creativity – what is it? – of course a huge topic in its own right. Sparing you the details, what I discovered was that there was an elegant way of distinguishing between coordination, cooperation and collaboration.

Simply put,

• coordination is required for all collective activities (bringing the parts together in a way that yields synergy),
• cooperation employs linear procedures to leverage collective potential (if each participant does exactly ‘x’, then a predictable ‘y’ is the result),
• while collaboration is different in that through nonlinear creative processes (no one knows exactly what they have to do until they do it, and even then the outcome is unknown) a shared understanding is created amongst the participants – one unique to those participants and that collaboration.

By way of example,

• coordination = a web search: bringing together parts of the web in a way that creates meaning, i.e. synergy,
• cooperation = social bookmarking: if many people tag their webpages using a particular platform, and a particular procedure, a resource much larger than any individual could develop may be generated,
• collaboration = Wikipedia editing: read an entry, contribute in any number of modes (form, content, discussion, etc) and from an infinite number of perspectives (the multiplicity of opinion and creative volition) one becomes part of a highly complex negotiation of a shared understanding (no one owns or comprehends the whole but contributes a part of it).

The below image represents the relationship between these three terms using the technical language developed in my phd (likely to require a bit more reading for context).

So thank you Anthony for the post (hopefully my criticism makes more sense now) and thank you especially for being so good natured about the criticism, as I really do highly recommend the book – especially as an excellent introduction to the incredible world of Internet-based collective activity and its many potentials and applications in the work place.

BTW, I wonder if my phd was the first on mass collaboration?.. Any others out there?

Actually, it was back on December 19 2007 – I’ve just been too busy with holidaying to post… Oh, and here’s the goofy picture I promised:

Keri gets a special place here as there would have been no way in hell I could have completed (and passed) my phd without her super human efforts taking care of the twins in those last months!

I’ve now become quite absorbed into yet another fantastic and exciting project: reengineering the City of Melbourne’s collaborative process for developing its ten year plan, and designing a wiki-based collaborative environment to support it. But more on this soon…