Xerography – every man’s brainpicker – heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one – instant steal!
As new technologies come into play, people become less and less convinced of the importance of self expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.
Marshall McLuhan, 1967
This book was written in a collaborative Book Sprint by six core authors over a five-day period in January 2010. It was developed under the aegis of transmediale, and executed by FLOSS Manuals. The six starting authors each come from different perspectives, as are the contributors who were adding to this living body of text.
As we began the collaborative process of crafting this book on the future of collaboration, we realized we were all working from a set of assumptions, many of them shared, some of them divergent. We were talking about a specific form of collaboration, specific media of collaboration, and specific goals of collaboration. And we were talking about a specific history of collaboration, and a correspondingly specific set of futures.
To begin looking at those futures, we look back to others who have looked into the future. Marshall McLuhan’s quote above, from “The Medium is the MESSAGE” give us our first clue about all of these assumptions we are making. We are talking about media, we are talking about freedom, we are talking about technologies, and we are talking about culture. McLuhan’s prophetic utterance, several decades before the photocopier fueled the punk cut-up design aesthetic, or the profusion of home-brew zines, is still a prophecy unmet. We are still chasing it. Mainstream culture continues to consolidate around block buster films, books, and music. Copyright restrictions make it harder and harder to exercise the creative power of these reproduction tools without breaking increasingly restrictive intellectual property rights laws. But one thing is unanimously true: “Teamwork succeeds private effort.”
This is no new thing. Teamwork has succeeded private effort for as long as man was hunting and gathering food, organizing and creating culture through tribal associations, common languages, defending themselves against enemies, organizing and centralizing religions, transforming power from the tribal to the city-state to the nation-state, waging large scale warfare, building an Atomic Bomb, etc.
Teamwork is nothing new, nor is it necessarily benevolent. The key assumptions we are making in this text are that we are talking about new technologies, that technology is not necessarily computers, that digital media makes it easier to collaborate across distance, but that it also makes barriers to collaboration more apparent. We are focused on collaboration that shares similar progressive social goals. We also see a potential threshold between teamwork and collaboration, and between sharing and collaboration.
We are focused on new technologies, and in particular digital technologies. We are interested in new forms of social organization through online networks. We are excited by the possibility of digital technology to bridge distances: we had collaborators writing this book with us from many corners of the world. The proliferation of communication networks allows this, as does the invention of new tools for collaboration.
But we are quick to realize that the removal of distance makes other barriers more apparent. Distance has been the greatest impediment to collaboration; in its removal other barriers quickly rise to the fore: language, culture, politics, education, etc.
Likewise, the core of this collaboration was taking place not in cyberspace, but in meatspace. We were there, in a room in Berlin for five very intense days of brainstorming, discussion, argument, and mostly… writing. The sound of tapping keyboards filled the room. Likewise, some of the most important developments in collaboration are the opportunities for meatspace meetings that would have been much more difficult prior to the advent of social networking software. From the Howard Dean US presidential campaign, to MeetUp, to Unconferences, to even the wrongheaded right wing Tea Party demonstrations protesting universal healthcare in the U.S.A (which are, it should be mentioned, heavily sponsored by the conservative Fox News network), to even the increasing prevalence of relationships started through online dating sites, some of the most important collaborative developments that this new technology has created are taking place offline.
While we are not interested in building Atomic Bombs, we are interested in finding the Higgs Boson. The presence of collaboration is not “good” in and of itself. Science provides a particularly stark example that highlights the importance of openness. There are military employed scientists who are using teamwork to develop more and more lethal weapons. They do this in secret: under security clearances that keep certain people out, their work is classified and never published, and their work is therefore anonymous. They do not share, and they do not own their work. Contrast this with the policies set forth at CERN, the nuclear physics research facility that just powered up the Large Hadron Collider to search for the elusive Higgs Boson. At CERN all work is published for the community of science. Every publication automatically is attributed to every scientist working at the facility, even if he or she was on vacation at the time the discovery was made, because the nature of the enterprise is so inherently collaborative over such a long term: the Large Hadron Collider project was started in 1984, and only made its initial runs at the end of 2009.
These were our assumptions as we began writing this book. This was our baseline from which we hoped to expand. The collaborations we are looking at involve new technologies, but we are interested in their offline results. This technology breaks down certain boundaries, but highlights others. And while this process can be used for a wide range of goals, the goals we are interested in are goals that are rather utopian: the increase of freedom of expression, the equality of authorship across group work, and the advancement of free culture.
