Collaboration

Collaboration comes from Latin ‘collaborare’, ‘work together’, towards a joint production or creation. It is the action of working together with someone to produce something. It is also ‘treasonous cooperation’ or ‘traitorous cooperation with an enemy’ from the French use of the word (tracing back to the Napoleonic Wars and then later the World War). A rendering that I now propose towards is ‘a working together with the other in cooperation (bringing into action/contact), against the constructed norm’ – ‘co-labor’ and ‘co-labor-ableing’.

Collaborations may be involuntary (reluctant recognition of necessity) and voluntary (an attempt of exploiting necessity), it can also be servile and/or ideological, (Stanley Hoffmann). In game theory a branch of applied mathematics and economics, it is that which looks at situations where multiple players make decisions in an attempt to maximize their returns. Today, technology with high speed internet, wireless connection, and web-based collaboration tools like blogs, and wikis [massively distributed collaboration (Mitchell Kapor)], and has as such created a ‘mass collaboration’. The power of social networks it beginning to permeate into business culture where many collaborative uses are being found including file sharing and knowledge transfer, ‘working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space’ (Evan Rosen). From this perspective, the attention now given to collaboration poses both an opportunity and a problem. The positive aspect is that it represents the emergence from invisibility of that social wealth which comes from beyond market or state, liberating activity from subsumption to market logic. The danger resides in the threat that its recognition as productivity may lead to a further reduction of life to economistic categories. Obstacles of class, gender, cultural capital, place and acquaintance limit access to people, spaces and activities. Protocols of participation evolve based on assumptions and norms, which are naturalized rather than problematicised.

Work in sociology has generated a coherent body of inter-organizational theory including the exchange perspective (Levine and White), power/resource dependency perspectives (Aldrich) and the political economy approach (Benson). The exchange perspective refers to organizations voluntarily co-operating in inter-organizational exchange of resources including finance, status, legitimacy and assets considered to be essential to their goal attainment. Exchange depends on the degree of consensus amongst organizations about goals, functions, ideologies, cultures, and customers; the motivation to exchange is internal to each organization based on choosing to interact, and organizations perceive mutual benefits or gains from interacting (Paul Williams, Helen Sullivan). ‘Labor’ refers to the actual activity or effort of producing goods or services (use-values). The labor classes are those who do not own the means of production as well as means of dissemination of their production. Labour-ableing >> by ‘labour-power’ or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description (Marx). Historically industrial and capitalist production have constructed the notion of an ownership of the produced, based on the ownership of the means of production and/or the capacity and risk of putting the means of production to work. Further, labor is a construction by caste and class differentiation and through poverty. Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labor in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labor; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth. (Patrick Colquhoun). This class of daily wage-earners is created through the process of primitive accumulation, which also simultaneously creates a home market for capital. The home market is created because the labor power itself becomes a commodity, the resources of consumption of the labor is now free for sale, means of production are alienated from the producer and therefore they have to be bought and sold, and now the production is done for profit, for market (Red Polemique).

Further, the produced goods – product now under ownership enters and is further held sway by the domain of copyright. This is ill-equipped to deal with contemporary forms of wide-scale cooperative production. Collectivity is inscribed in both their form and architecture, from the discursive and serial nature of problem solving in forums, to the version control histories of software and wikis. These practices are confronted with a legal framework unable to respond to their needs. This explains why so many have turned to alternative forms of copyright licensing which change copyright’s defaults so as to facilitate or even encourage free collaboration, such as the GPL and (later) Creative Commons. When collaboration is open and there is no explicit contract, the binding terms can be a shared passion, a common goal, a sense of community (or the lack thereof), but nevertheless, the need for implicit and explicit structure remains. Responsibility, as a social contract without reproducing vocabularies and strategies of legal/illegal bureaucracies, and mutual agreements that can advance a certain common set-up and strategy based on friendship, the affirmation of otherness, and selves constantly undergoing shifts and transformations; takes over and can then supplant the ideas and notions of ‘Ownership’. Sustained involvement requiring a substantial expenditure of effort, or active engagement to create or promote something deemed of worth or importance, demands a more careful framework. Care is required because participation implicates our sense of identity. Defection by others, a sense of betrayal, anger at manipulation or exploitation are destructive not only to the immediate work but to willingness to collaborate in the future. On the other hand every collaboration needs room also to change, and a breathing space which acknowledges the different levels of commitment of its participants, which themselves will vary over time.

Collaboration is fundamental to human experience, in this sense we our ‘selves’ are a social construction. Sharing ideas, information, technologies, skills in a non-hierarchical mode, is crucial towards building a platform towards collaboration that constructs the possibilities of ‘polytely’(Greek poly- and -tel- meaning ‘many goals’ and can be described as complex problem-solving situations characterized by the presence of multiple simultaneous goals). Collaboration is a process of meaning creation and generation, through a call for action, addressing a shared concern through various stakeholders, communities and partners constructing multiple alternatives through an evaluative process, building a collective knowing. ‘Knowledge’, as in the idea of ‘learning facts’ (Pea); what groups learn is often practices rather than facts, ways of doing things. Tacit or practical knowing actually has an epistemological priority over explicit or theoretical knowing. To understand a proposition requires that one already have immense amounts of background ontological knowing about the world, about people and about the kinds of objects referred to by the proposition. Language is a form of communication and interaction with other people and with the world – to understand language one must understand it within the context of a broader tacit pre-understanding of social interaction and of the everyday world of ordinary life (Heidegger). It is in the process of building collaborative knowing; there is interplay between tacit and explicit knowing. The mark of a really successful design or problem-solving meeting is that something brilliant comes out of it that cannot be attributed to an individual or to a combination of individual contributions. It is an emergent, which means that if you look at a transcript of the meeting you can see the conceptual object taking shape but you cannot find it in the bits and pieces making up the discourse (Bereiter). Discourse, which makes things explicit, relies on a background of tacit or practical knowing. The co-construction of shared knowing in discourse involves the negotiation of tacit meanings, for instance of the affordances of artifacts. The network of these meanings constitutes the social world in which we live and which we come to understand by building collaborative knowing. Epistemology asks how knowledge is possible; social epistemology shows how knowing is interactively constructed within communities (G Stahl).
‘Co-labor-ableing’ thus may construct and build an empowering and enabling ‘commune’ from within, one that owns the means of production and controls the modes of dissemination’ through a constant negotiation between the co-laborers and a ‘commune’ ownership of the production thereby no longer on constructing a communication/message/code derived from and only speaking back to our own class (Walter Benjamin).