[ox-en] Sharing / Cooperation / Collaboration / Collectivism

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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