Douglas Rushkoff

Herding the Cats, indeed. Moderating a panel of smart and considerate folks is so much harder than refereeing a polarized debate among ignorant people calling each other nazis. I'm not used to this.

Nick's classifications plus Clay's addition may actually be a better way of organizing this discussion than my original outline. Except, of course, for the way one kind of group can become another. The kids of 4chan pooling visual resources become a hornets nest when prodded, or a crowd-sourced ad campaign for Chevy trucks becomes a tool for activists to criticize GM. A network created for one purpose ends up functioning in different ways when the circumstances change.

But let's start on some examples of good productive groups, and of what makes these groups work the best in the slightly more conscious sense.

Bean counting and market prediction are definitely great applications of group theory, but let's set them aside for now. I suppose by Open Source and Crowd-sourcing I meant the productive crowd. And I think it's fine to look at large scale productive crowds of individuals (say, a MoveOn advertising contest), a large scale productive crowd of sub-groups (Wikipedia) or even a large scale crowd attempting to do one big thing (say, people turning their computers over to SETI ). A denial-of-service attack wouldn't count, since it's not productive but rather destructive, and would fall under digital mob tactics a bit later.

So I guess I'm asking us to look on the constructive, positive side - but with some critical filters on, as well. What are the greatest achievements of collaborative online groups? What kinds of collaborations - if any - have been facilitated by the kinds of groupings that could have only occurred between people working en masse, online? Have they produced any novel yield or, as Jaron Lanier argues in You Are Not a Gadget, are these essentially uncreative outputs or copies of things we already have?

I read about Wikipedia, Firefox, and Linux, and get the feeling that there's something very new and wonderful happening. But sometimes it seems that the only thing that's different - fundamentally - is that people are working together from home.

Are we seeing truly new forms of collaboration, and are they leading to truly new kinds of achievements? Or does the novelty of their more superficial qualities simply make them appear that way?