from TED talks… Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.

It’s a nice quick historical overview of collaboration as linked to communication and technology. At the end of course he reaches the contemporary age of open-source networks and prompting us for a wealth of the commons, as related to competition. Perhaps naîve of me, but i would rather not think like Starbucks or Apple or even Google necessarily as models for how we can “use” more open systems of information to achieve a bigger buck. Companies like those doing so is significant, of course, but allowing customer participation in the form of demanding a different fat-free milk offering (see MyStarbucksIdea), i wouldn’t exactly call an innovative open system. But on the other hand, I see my mind changing as I type, I suppose we don’t have to see competition in so aggressive of terms as smashing down the others as Rheingold references early on in his talk. Giant corporations like those trying to investigate more open ways of using and sharing information is important as to see the slowly changing mentality of openness as opposed to greater secrecy and privacy as a means to succeed in a coming-of-age post-capitalist society. It’s simply that I suppose there are lots of smaller scale, local networks that I find much more interesting and innovative in that regard (like bricolabs and many that have been posted on this list in the past).

An interesting database that Howard Rheingold began: http://www.cooperationcommons.com/