Collaborative Futures

“Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.”
—Tom Clancy

A Brief History of Collaboration

Free Culture and Beyond

The Free Culture movement and Creative Commons are built on top of the assumption that there is a deep analogy between writing code and various art forms.  This assertion is up for debate and highly contested by some collaborators on this project.  (For more on this topic see the chapter “Can Design By Committee Work?”)

No doubt software is a cultural form, but we should be aware of the limits of the comparison to other creative modes.  After all, software operates according to various objective standards.   Successful software works; clean code is preferable; good code executes. What does it mean for a cultural work to “execute”?  Where code executes, art expresses. Indeed, many forms of art depend on ambiguity, layered meanings, and contradiction.  Code is a binary language, whereas the words used to write this book, even though they are in English, will be interpreted in various unpredictable ways. Looking at all of creativity through the lens of code is reductive.

We also wonder if collaboration is possible or desirable for a project that is deeply personal or subjective.  Would I necessarily want to collaborate on a memoir, a poem, a painting?  We also wonder if we can ever not collaborate, in the sense that we are always in relationship to our culture and environment, to the creations that proceeded ours, to the audience.  Or, to make matters stranger, can we ever not collaborate, even when it seems that we are alone?  As musician David Byrne wrote on his blog:

“But one might also ask: Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view—editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this? ”

—David Byrne <journal.davidbyrne.com/2010/03/031510-collaborations.html>

For those who believe that the code and culture analogy is deeply insightful, the free culture movement is an attempt to translate the ethics and practices of free software to other fields, some closely tied to technology changes (including wikis and social media sites mentioned above) allowing more access and capability to share and remix materials. Creative Commons, founded in 2001, provides public licenses for content akin to free software licenses, including a copyleft license roughly similar to the FDL (Free Documentation License) that is used by Wikipedia. These licenses have been used for blogs, wikis, videos, music, textbooks, and more, and have provided the legal basis for collaborations often involving large institutions, for example publishing and re-use of Open Educational Resources, most famously the OpenCourseWare project started at MIT as well as many-to-many sharing with extensive latent collaboration, often hosted on sites like Flickr.

There is still much to learn from historical examples of collaborative theory and practice—and some of these in turn have lessons to learn from current collaboration practices—for anarchist theory, see the Solidarity chapter, for science, see the Science 2.0 chapter. Even the term autonomy may have a useful contribution to contemporary discussion of collaboration, for example resolving the incompleteness and vagueness present in both “free” and “open” terminology.

Open

There are different levels of openness. Being more or less open implies a level of agency, being more or less able to act, and/or being part of something (e.g. a group, debate, project), and/or having the power of access or not. There are logics of control and networks in any collaborative system—but it becomes important to imagine control other than relating to a totality. In their book “The Exploit: A Theory of Networks”(2007), Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker suggest imagining networks outside an “abstract whole”, networks that are not controlled in a total way. They further argue that open source fetishizes all the wrong things. The opposition between open and closed is flawed. An open collaboration in comparison to a less open (almost closed) collaboration suggests the possibility for shifting hierarchies within the collaboration. A closed collaboration can be understood as a defined micro-community that has gathered for particular reasons, and that remains as group intact for the duration of the project.

Collaboration as in Collaborative Futures might be in-between open and closed. The question of a collaborative future is a projection. Using imagination as a tool, a collaborative future is as open as possible confirming the variability of a system - dissent, multiplicity, and possible failure allow agency in its proper sense.

http://www.booki.cc/collaborativefutures/_v/1.0/credits/

Criteria for Collaboration

Collaboration is employed so widely to describe the methodology of production behind information goods, that it occludes as much as it reveals. In addition, governments, business and cultural entrepreneurs apparently can’t get enough of it, so a certain skepticism is not unwarranted. But even if overuse as a buzzword has thrown a shadow over the term, what follows is an attempt to try and construct an idea of what substantive meaning it could have, and distinguish it from related or neighboring ideas such as cooperation, interdependence or co-production. This task seems necessary not least because if the etymology of the word is literally ‘working together’, there is a delicate and significant line between ‘working with’ and ‘being put to work by’…

Some products characterized as collaborative are generated simply through people’s common use of tools, presence or performance of routine tasks. Others require active coordination and deliberate allocation of resources. Whilst the results may be comparable from a quantitative or efficiency perspective, a heterogeneity of social relations and design lie behind the outputs.

The intensity of these relationships can be described as sitting somewhere on a continuum from strong ties with shared intentionality to incidental production by strangers, captured through shared interfaces or agents, sometimes unconscious byproducts of other online activity.

Consequently we can set out both strong and weak definitions of collaboration, whilst remaining aware that many cases will be situated somewhere in between. While the former points toward the centrality of negotiation over objectives and methodology, the latter illustrate the harvesting capacity of technological frameworks where information is both the input and output of production.

Criteria for assessing the strength of a collaboration include:

Questions of Intention

Must the participant actively intend to contribute, is willful agency needed? Or is a minimal act of tagging a resource with keywords, or mere execution of a command in an enabled technological environment (emergence), sufficient?

Questions of Goals

Is participation motivated by the pursuit of goals shared with other participants or individual interests?

Questions of (self) Governance

Are the structures and rules of engagement accessible? Can they be contested and renegotiated? Are participants interested in engaging on this level (control of the mechanism)?

Questions of Coordination Mechanisms

Is human attention required to coordinate the integration of contributions? Or can this be accomplished automatically?

Questions of Property

How is control or ownership organized over the outputs (if relevant)? Who is included and excluded in the division of the benefits?

Questions of Knowledge Transfer

Does the collaboration result in knowledge transfer between participants? Is it similar to a community of practice, described by Etienne Wenger as:

“…groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

Questions of Identity

To what degree are individual identities of the participants affected by the collaboration towards a more unified group identity?

Questions of Scale

Questions of scale are key to group management and have a substantial effect on collaboration. The different variables of scale are often dynamic and can change through the process of the collaboration. By that changing the nature and the dynamics of the collaboration altogether.

• Size—How big or small is the number of participants?
• Length (time)—How long or short is the time frame of the collaboration?
• Speed—How time consuming is each contribution? How fast is the decision making process?
• Space—Does the collaboration take place over a limited or extended geographic scale?
• Scope -  How minimal or complex is the most basic contribution? How extensive & ambitious is the shared goal?

Questions of Network Topology

How are individuals connected to each other? Are contributions individually connected to each other or are they all coordinated through a unifying bottle-neck mechanism? Is the participation network model highly centralized, largely distributed, or assumes different shades of decentralization?

Questions of Accessibility

Can anyone join the collaboration? Is there a vetting process? Are participants accepted by invitation only?

Questions of Equality

Are all contributions largely equal in scope? Does a small group of participants generate a far larger portion of the work? Are the levels of control over the project equal or varied between the different participants?

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

In the early 1970s, when feminism was just gaining steam, a woman named Jo Freeman wrote an essay that has since become a classic: “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Though Freeman's essay was a response to the informal nature of women's “consciousness raising” groups popular during that period, it's also worth noting that second wave feminism emerged partly in reaction to the implicit and oppressive misogyny of the New Left, which united around an idealistic vision of decentralized “participatory democracy.”

We've chosen to include an excerpt of this groundbreaking essay for various reasons. First of all, it underscores the vital role the women's movement had in theorizing, developing, and promoting non-hierarchical models of social justice organizing, an innovation they rarely get credited for. At the same time, however, it articulates the limits of these methods from an explicitly feminist perspective. Freeman's point, radically simplified, is that the disavowal of power too often masks its covert manipulation; informal elites can be more pernicious than formal ones because they deny their own existence.

It's no secret that software and technology industries are dominated by men, nor that many of the most visible figures writing about and promoting networked collaboration are male. We want to remind them that privilege is the product of complex social forces that cannot simply be wished away, no matter how loudly or frequently the word “open” is invoked. Those who like to believe that “on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog” are probably men (anyone remember that University of Maryland study reporting that chatters with female usernames got 25 times the number of malicious messages their masculine counterparts received?). The point is that offline prejudice, like offline privilege, carries over to our online relationships. The worry is that structurelessness can create a vacuum in which these imbalances and biases flourish.

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness—and that is not the nature of a human group.

 

This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly “laissez faire” philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women’s movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

 

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large.

…

When informal elites are combined with a myth of “structurelessness,” there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.

—Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” 1970

 

 

CREDITS

This book was first written over 5 days (Jan 18-22, 2010) during a Book Sprint in Berlin. 7 people (5 writers, 1 programmer and 1 facilitator) gathered to collaborate and produce a book in 5 days with no prior preparation and with the only guiding light being the title ‘Collaborative Futures’.

These collaborators were: Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michael Mandiberg, Mike Linksvayer, Marta Peirano, Alan Toner, Aleksandar Erkalovic (programmer) and Adam Hyde (facilitator).

The event was part of the 2010 transmediale festival <www.transmediale.de/en/collaborative-futures>. 200 copies were printed the same week through a local print on demand service and distributed at the festival in Berlin. 100 copies were printed in New York later that month.

This book was revised, partially rewritten, and added to over three days in June 2010 during a second book sprint in New York, NY, at the Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology as part of the show Re:Group Beyond Models of Consensus and presented in conjunction with Not An Alternative and Upgrade NYC.

 

http://www.booki.cc/collaborativefutures/_v/1.0/credits/

Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

 

 

Material excerpt for Traces Open Zone Edition created using booki.cc open and free collaborative publishing software and platform. Material from the 'Collaborative Futures' booki, created and published during the Book Sprint at transmediale.10