Group items tagged

recommended by Howard Rheingold,  He says: "Mark Elliott claims that Wikipedia is an example of how people use online media stigmergically." Mark Elliott says (from the site): "As stigmergy is a method of communication in which individuals communicate with one another by modifying their local environment, it is a logical extension to apply the term to many types (if not all) of Web-based communication, especially media such as the wiki."

Computer-mediated communication systems are believed to have powerful effects on social relationships. Many claim that this new form of social interaction encourages wider participation, greater candor, and an emphasis on merit over status. In short, the belief is that social hierarchies are dissolved and that flatter, more egalitarian social organizations emerge. Networked communications, it is argued, will usher in a renewed era of democratic participation and revitalized community. But as with earlier technologies that promised freedom and power, the central problems of social relationships remain, although in new and possibly more challenging forms.

Canadian site encouraging aiding and abetting cooperation towards desired changes at a community level.

"Microeconomics Community Questions TOPICS Supply, demand and market equilibrium Elasticity Consumer and producer surplus Scarcity, possibilities, preferences and opportunity cost Production decisions and economic profit Forms of competition Game theory and Nash equilibrium"

A tiny book published in 1951 by the longshoreman Eric Hoffer.  From wikipedia: The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam. Hoffer believes that mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable; that religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics, even when their stated goals or values differ.

The HUB has it's own special recipe for collaboration. Here's a quick guide on how to create a meaningful community from a beautiful space.

Jane Vella, the founder of Global Learning Partners, gained her insights on adult education from the thousands of participants she met over her 40 years of teaching in Africa, Asia and North America. Jane's academic research into the work of theorists Paulo Freire, Malcolm Knowles, Kurt Lewin, and Benjamin Bloom confirmed what she saw in the communities where she had worked:  that adults learn best through a "dialogue" that takes place in an atmosphere of mutual respect and safety, and with learning designs that are grounded in the reality of their lives.

In the past four decades, behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists have discovered many cognitive biases human brains fall prey to when thinking and deciding. Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking. Bayesian reasoning offers a way to improve on the native human reasoning style. Reasoning naively, we tend not to seek alternative explanations, and sometimes underrate the influence of prior probabilities in Bayes' theorem. Less Wrong users aim to develop accurate predictive models of the world, and change their mind when they find evidence disconfirming those models, instead of being able to explain anything.

Week 2, #COOPLIT Mark Pagel, one of the world's leading experts on human evolution and development, visits the RSA to investigate our species' capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

Public, private, and nonprofit institutions and organizations often work together in a coalition (an organization of organizations working together for a common purpose) with communities, neighborhoods, and constituencies. In this paper, coalition is the term used for a multiorganizational process that is also called a partnership or a collaborative (state-of-the-art resources on coalition building are available at www.ahecpartners.org).  Usually, coalition strategies for working together are described as networking, coordinating, cooperating, or collaborating, although the use of these terms is often confusing.  This paper suggests definitions of these four strategies used by coalitions to help clarify the most appropriate use of each in particular settings.  Although the examples that follow the definitions are based in health care, the four strategies are utilized in addressing a wide variety of issues.

 how mycorrhizal networks connect the roots of trees, facilitating the sharing of resources.  new molecular tools that can distinguish the DNA of one fungal individual from another, or of one tree's roots from another.

The Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) is a package of resources and activities that enable groups of people anywhere to organize, build trust, and collaboratively create solutions for problems impacting their community. The toolkit provides a dynamic framework that integrates knowledge and action to solve challenges. Designed to harness the benefits of group action and the power of open sharing, the activities draw on each participant's strengths and perspectives as the group works to accomplish a common goal.

[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis-this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

Canadian group that emphasizes focusing on what's gone well today and has a deck of cards that helps build empathy and moves conversations and relationships forward.