Businesses and nations succeed only by defeating, destroying and dominating the competition. The old way of thinking is changing. Politics is about your side winning at all costs; just look at the farce here as we in the UK head towards a general election. The weekly Prime Ministers question time in the House of Commons is more about scoring points than about debating what is right for the country. But I think we can see the beginnings of a new story emerge.  A world in which co-operation, collective action and complex interdependencies - collaboration, play a more important role. The central, but not all-important role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit to make room. The building of good or best practices, creating standards and rules of governance, even within IT the Open Source collaboration proves the point. As communication improves across all layers, and the world in which we operate and trade in becomes effectively smaller whilst still competitive, the common baseline we all expect moves from being proprietary into commonly, and often freely, available resources. Taking last weeks blog about Open Data means we can merge information to make it more useful to our own situations and advantage, either on a personal level or for a new business solution or advantage.

Collaboration is not new, in fact is the foundation of civilisation. Recently I came across an article by Howard Rheingold and I quote some of this now.

“Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization. In small family groups, nomadic hunters bring down rabbits, gathering food. The form of wealth in those days was enough food to stay alive. But at some point they banded together to hunt bigger game. And we don't know exactly how they did this, although they must have solved some collective action problems. It only makes sense that you can't hunt mastodons while you're fighting with the other groups.

And again, we have no way of knowing, but it's clear that a new form of wealth must have emerged. More protein than a hunter's family could eat before it rotted. So that raised a social question that I believe must have driven new social forms. Did the people who ate that mastodon meat owe something to the hunters and their families? And if so, how did they make arrangements? Again, we can't know, but we can be pretty sure that some form of symbolic communication must have been involved. (Probably the beginning of barter and trade).

Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires, and it was the administers of these empires who begin hiring people to keep track of the wheat, sheep and wine that was owed, as well as the taxes that was owed on them by making marks, marks on clay at that time.

Not too much longer after that, the alphabet was invented. And this powerful tool was really reserved, for thousands of years, for the elite administrators who kept track of accounts for the empires. And then, another communication technology enabled new media. The printing press came along, and within decades, millions of people became literate. And from literate populations, new forms of collective action emerged in the spheres of knowledge, religion and politics. We saw scientific revolutions, the Protestant Reformation, constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before. Not created by the printing press, but enabled by the collective action that emerges from literacy. And again, new forms of wealth emerged.

Now, commerce is ancient. Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry book keeping.

Now, of course, the enabling technologies are based on the Internet. And in the many-to-many era, every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a marketplace. Evolution is speeding up. More recently, that power is untethering and leaping off the desktops. And very, very quickly we are going to see a significant proportion, if not the majority, human race walking around holding, carrying or wearing supercomputers linked at speeds greater than what we consider to be broadband today.”

You may recall a blog I did last year on the very topic of IT jewellery which would “hand-shake” and provide you with details pertaining to the person you just passed or met, details obtained from what they wanted to share, and from public domain data they may not have wished to share (things like Facebook, LinkedIn, press articles etc). Collaboration may no longer be voluntary, it may occur with the linking of “open data” to private data to provide a new layer of relevance specific to you and your requirements, common points of interest and therefore generate a new form of commerce. 

Collaboration creates two main issues that we need to be aware of and address. The first is The Prisoner’s dilemma. To quote from Howard again “The prisoner's dilemma is actually a story that's overlaid  on a mathematical matrix that came out of the game theory in the early years of thinking about nuclear war:  two players who couldn't trust each other. Let me just say that every unsecured transaction is a good example of the prisoner's dilemma. Person with the goods, person with the money, because they can't trust each other, are not going to exchange. Neither one wants to be the first one, or they're going to get the sucker's payoff. But both lose, of course, because they don't get what they want. If they could only agree, if they could only turn a prisoner's dilemma into a different payoff matrix, called an assurance game, they could proceed.”  The second one is the “Tragedy of the commons” . Howards says “Garrett Hardin used it to talk about overpopulation in the late 1960s.  He used the example of a common grazing area in which each person, by simply maximizing their own flock, led to overgrazing and the depletion of the resource. He had the rather gloomy conclusion that humans will inevitably despoil any common pool resource in which people cannot be restrained from using it.

Now, Eleanor Ostrom, a political scientist, in 1990 asked the interesting question that any good scientist should ask, which is, is it really true that humans will always despoil commons? So she went out and looked at what data she could find. She looked at thousands of cases of humans sharing watersheds, forestry resources, fisheries, and discovered that, yes, in case after case, humans destroyed the commons that they depended on. But she also found many instances in which people escaped the prisoner's dilemma. In fact, the tragedy of the commons is a multi-player prisoner's dilemma. And she said that people are only prisoners if they consider themselves to be. They escape by creating institutions for collective action. And she discovered, I think most interestingly, that among those institutions that worked, there were a number of common design principles. And those principles seem to be missing from those institutions that don't work.

Open-sourced production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla,  can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm, nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've know them. Google enriches itself by enriching thousands of bloggers through AdSense. Amazon has opened its Applications Programming Interface to 60,000 developers, countless Amazon shops.  They're enriching others, not out of altruism, but as a way of enriching themselves. ebay solved the prisoner's dilemma and created a market, where none would have existed, by creating a feedback mechanism that turns a prisoner's dilemma game into an assurance game.

Instead of, "neither of us can trust each other so we have to make suboptimal moves," it's, "you prove to me that you are trustworthy, and I will cooperate." Wikipedia has used thousands of volunteers to create a free encyclopaedia with a million and a half articles in 200 languages in just a couple of years.”

This has been a long Blog from me today, but the point I hope is clear. We need to collaborate to survive, we need to be aware of the risks, but most importantly, we need to trust each other. Now trust is something I fear has been eroded over the years and we need to review and restore it once more. Let’s get back to the old British banking phase of “My word is my bond” and begin to openly collaborate for mutual benefit.