Getting groups to work together coherently - coordination process (economic term)

Historically done by founding an institution to coordinate people's efforts

Communication costs

Put the cooperation into the infrastructure

To design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a byproduct of the operating of the system without regard to institutional models

Tagging - a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification

The hard problem being solved here is a Coordination Problem

Institution - draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals

Side effects of forming an institution

-Take on a management problem

-You have to bring structure into place (economic. Legal,  physical - and their costs)

-Forming an  inst is inherently exclusionary - can't recruit everyone into it, must exclude some people - resulting in a professional class

When cooperation is built into the infrastructure you can leave the people where they are - and take the problem to the individuals rather than bring the individuals to the problem - arrange the coordination in the group

The institutional imperative or right to shape people's work is lost when it's volunteer effort but the institutional cost is shed, which gives you greater flexibility

Ex: Flicker - it replaces planning with coordination

A general aspect of these cooperative systems

Ex: mobile phones - we stopped making plans and say "I'll call you when I get there"

This is a point to point replacement of coordination with planning

Adv: we coordinate the group effort and deal with it as we go because we're well enough coordinated that we don't have to take on the problem of deciding in advance what to do

Power loss distribution

80/20 rule

Inst only have two tools - carrots and sticks and favors the 20% value providers

The cooperative infrastructure model favors not losing any of the value providers

If a system requires giving up any of the value, reengineer it so that anyone can contribute at any amount

The coordination response asks not how are these people as employees, but what is their contribution like

Not "is one a good employee" but "do I want whatever they are contributing"

Institution as enabler and inst as obstacle

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when an inst is reckoned an obstacle its first goal shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation

And go through something like the Kübler-Ross stages of reaction: denial, anger, grieving, bargaining, acceptance

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bus co suing indvs for forming a carpool and depriving them of revenue {{how to avoid this in Para systems - pre entry acceptance/understanding of cmty rule of serving the collective good inclusively

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inst are prevented from capturing the value of the 80% - how then to do it?

A single programmer can, without having to move into a professional relationship with an institution can improve it and never be seen from again is unreachable in classic institutions but is part of cooperative systems

{{We should spend a week or so living with one another to observe their styles of living and how they would naturally align with the collective}}

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meetup ex; stay at home moms most user

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if you want to know what technology is going to change the world. Don't pay attention to 13 yr old boys, pay attention to young mothers because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that doesn't materially make their lives better.

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this is a revolution - a profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. It's a revolution in that it's a change in equilibrium

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including new downsides

Web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization - it had deprofessionalized publishing

The shield laws are becoming increasingly incoherent because the inst is becoming so

People are tying themselves in knots trying to answer the question "are bloggers journalists" and the answer is "it's not important" because that's not the right question

Journalism was an answer to an even more important question which is "how will society be informed. How will they share ideas and opinions" and if there's an answer to that that lies outside the professional framework of journalism - it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class

As much as we want the shield laws, the inst to which they are attached is becoming incoherent.

pro ana example

The logic of the support group is value neutral - a support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group

The normative goals of the support group that we're used to came from the institutions that were framing them and not from the infrastructure

Once the infrastructure becomes generically available, the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone

Non state actors trying to influence global affairs and taking advantage of these

As with the printing press, if it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from point A to point B, it takes us from point A to Chaos

The printing press took us through 200 yrs of chaos from the rule of the Catholic church to the Westphalia Treaty and nation states.

This will produce 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage

And the more those groups forgo traditional institutional imperatives like deciding in advance what's going to happen, or the profit motive, the more leverage they'll get

And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be

And this is going to happen one arena at a time, one inst at a time

The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific

This won't be a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework - it's going to be much more complicated than  that.

The point is it's going to be a massive readjustment, and since we can see it in advance and know it's coming, my argument is, we might as well get good at it.