Collaboration and Cooperation
As we've seen from our quick trip through the history of the Internet and the World Wide Web, most of the ways the technology works are predicated upon agreements between people about all sorts of small details. From the rules governing communications protocols to the data formats of the content that gets shipped around the web, everything on the Internet works because people have agreed to cooperate and collaborate.
Generating collaboration and cooperation online is always the result of managing two powerful tools to encourage and discourage behavior. Those two tools, defined broadly, are: technical and social.
Technical Mechanisms of Collaboration/Cooperation
Technical mechanisms of collaboration include the different ways we build tools that help us work together. There are many sites and services out there that help us work with others. Google Docs made waves when they enabled people to collaboratively edit documents in real-time. And features such as the ability to share playlists on audio sites (like Rdio and Spotify) or video sites (like YouTube and Vimeo) have become common ways to allow us to collaborate on the curation of the massive amount of media content uploaded every day.
Sites like Wikipedia use a technology called a "wiki" to enable any user on the site to edit pages and content. The wiki also provides authors the ability to have conversations about content, to mark and store revisions of content, and many other tools that allow for managing the community of individuals editing pages on the site. These technology tools help prevent people from ruining other people's work, and help contributors and editors keep on top of changes in need of review. Without these technical tools, sites like Wikipedia would be unable to flourish.
An incredible aspect of the contemporary web is the fact that so many of these powerful tools are available for anyone to use. So with a little bit of knowledge it's very easy to set up a site that offers all of the same technology tools as a massive site like Wikipedia. The software that Wikipedia runs (which is called Mediawiki) is available for free to everyone. This has led to many, many wiki sites being created, and although Wikipedia is the largest, many others are very valuable and successful.
Social Mechanisms of Collaboration/Cooperation
Although the tools to share and collaborate are often widely and freely available, just adopting a specific tool does not guarantee the success of a collaborative or cooperative effort. It is usually necessary to spend just as much effort, if not more, on developing social mechanisms to enable collaboration and cooperation. Sometimes the social mechanisms fill in the gap where technology has not yet caught up (such as the case with the #Hashtag), and sometimes the social mechanism is so good that technology never needs to catch up (such as the case with the #Hashtag).
Returning to our Wikipedia example, consider the way that Wikipedia works at a social level. Wikipedia has a beginners page called "10 Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia". From there, the site's different subdomains flesh out additional guidelines for contributing, all of which adhere to the core guidelines. Wikipedia users (called "Wikipedians") take their guidelines very seriously, and they debate and implement punishments and restitution when editors get out of line.
In order to accomplish meaningful work, it is important to be on the same page as your collaborators, both from a technical point of view and from a social point of view.