Howard Rheingold is a leading thinker on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communications media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing).
CooperationCommons is one of his virtual communities organized around the discussion, "What is true collaboration and what are the tools to enable it?"
Uploaded to Flickr is an enormous chart of technologies, both mainstream and emerging, that serve as virtual containers, conduits, cisterns, and causeways for virtual and physical groups to work together. They are arranged within a matrix, one axis being qualities (structure, rules, memory, thresholds, feedback, resources and identity).
The top axis identifies what family or cluster the technology falls in,
usually in relation to how data is collected and organized:
self-organized mesh networks, peer-to-peer, social mobile computing,
social software, etc.
The tools range from the popular subjects (Wikipedia, ever-popular Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and Rheingold's Smart Mobs) to more esoteric and technoteric topics (geospatial focal points, information thresholds, social metadata and ad hoc taxonomies).
>> Technologies of Cooperation Map
>> CooperationCommons site
>> Howard Rheingold's Web site
>> Stanford University Faculty page
>> Smart Mobs weblog/book site
>> Reed College Alumni Magazine Profile
>> A 48MB Quicktime movie
of Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri outlining the Cooperation
Project, licensed under Creative Commons, hosted by the Internet Archive
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