News: Course on Cooperation @ Stanford {UPDATED}

Wednesday, December 08, 2004 - 03:55 PM

Higher Education now has an interdisciplinary curriculum of cooperation studies... in which cooperative arrangements, interdependencies, and collective action play a more prominent role... scientists are beginning to see how cooperation actually works in biology, sociology, mathematics, psychology, economics, computer science and political science... Non-students who live in the area can show up to the course without signing up! UPDATED April 28, 2006

"YOU ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND!"
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New Literacy of Cooperation [pdf]

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Main Page | Syllabus | Course Goals | Group Blog
Cooperation on del.icio.us | Course Assignments | Sources

What can evolutionary biology teach us about the complexities of human cooperation? Can institutions for collective action be designed more effectively by examining the ways people agree to use water, grazing lands, fisheries, intellectual property? Do alternative currencies, peer production techniques, collectively-created online public goods point toward a sharing economy that differs in fundamental ways from previous means of organizing production? What are the opportunities and dangers of hyper-mediated collective action via smart mobs and mobile social software? Is open-source politics the beginning of an emergent democracy, or a media fad?

Thousands of volunteers have created over one million pages of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia - in over 100 languages. The Wikipedia definition of Co-operation / Cooperation is the practice of people or greater entities working in common with commonly agreed-upon goals and possibly methods, instead of working separately in competition.

The open source movement showed that world-class software could be built without corporate oversight or market incentives... Collective knowledge-gathering, sharing economies, social software, prediction markets - numerous experiments in technology-assisted cooperation are taking place.
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ARCHIVES : A New Literacy of Cooperation and Collective Action

BEST OF Cooperation Lectures (14 minutes, 11 MB), key insights from each lecture

1. Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri Large (48 MB) | Small (24 MB)

- Howard Rheingold, a long-time student of online communities, places in historical context the emergence of increasingly powerful mechanisms for cooperation

- Andrea Saveri, Research Director at Institute for the Future, outlines the lecture series and where they intend it to go.

2. Peter Kollock Large (137 MB) | Small (62 MB), professor of sociology at UCLA, lectures on strategies to avoid the social dilemmas posed by the tragedy of the commons and prisoner's dilemma situations.

3. Paul Hartzog Large (184 MB) | Small (62 MB), & Panarchy, who studies complexity theory and networked governance, lectures on institutions for collective action and the different approaches to the social dilemma, covering the story from Garrett Hardin to Elinor Ostrom.

4. Peter Corning Large (117 MB) | Small (40 MB), Director for the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems, lectures on the role of synergies in natural selection and why Darwin didn't have a blind spot in understanding the value of cooperation.

5. Jimmy Wales Large (201 MB) | Small (69 MB), the founder of Wikipedia, lectures on how cooperation works at Wikipedia.

6. Steven Weber Large (157 MB) | Small (53 MB), Director of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley and author of The Success of Open Source, lectures on how open and closed systems together will shape the future of property and business.

7. Ross Mayfield Large (71 MB) | Small (24 MB), who blogs about markets and technology, lectures on emergent democracy, group forming networks, methods of pluralism, blogs, and wikis.

8. Zack Rosen Large (64 MB) | Small (22 MB), lectures on his project CivicSpace, formerly DeanSpace, and the future of emergent democracy.

9. Bernardo Huberman Large (118 MB) | Small (40 MB), Director of the Information Dynamics Lab at Hewlett-Packard, lectures on collective intelligence and cooperative problem solving through prediction markets.

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Toward a Literacy of Cooperation: HUM 202 (Stanford Humanities Lab)
Every Wednesday • January 5 - March 16, 2005 • 4:15-5:45 PST
Stanford University • Wallenberg Hall (Bldg 160), Room 127 • DIRECTIONS