GROK collect

Cooperatives have been around in one form or another throughout human history, but modern models began popping up about 150 years ago. Today’s co-ops are collaboratively owned by their members, who also control the enterprise collaboratively by democratic vote. This means that decisions made in cooperatives are balanced between the pursuit of profit, and the needs of members and their communities. Most co-ops also follow the Seven Cooperative Principles, a unique set of guidelines that help maintain their member-driven nature.

From health care to jobs to community development, why the future will be cooperative

Public Banking

challenge

It’s a perfect time to take a look at what it means to own a home, to make a home, to rent a home. This is an opportunity to take the best from the old ways of doing things, and from the new, and to define “home” in a way that doesn’t place unsustainable burdens on resources, both natural and fiscal. Some of the solution lies in adjusting our expectations about what a household looks like and how much space we really need. Some of it lies in recognizing that, in a world where our energy use is destroying the climate, we have to change the way we put our houses together.

When people bought houses and intended to stay, they made a commitment to the community. They made lasting connections with people and businesses. Once a house became something that you owned just long enough for the big cashout, those connections were lost.

Small is beautiful

TAKE BACK YOUR TIME is a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.

r, working less is essential to a sustainable environment

It’s time to begin trading gains in productivity for time instead of for stuff. A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that simply by cutting our work time to European levels, we could reduce our energy use and carbon footprint by 25-30 percent. It would also make us happier—Forbes magazine reported that the four happiest nations on earth—Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden—are all characterized by the comparatively short working hours and attentiveness to work-life balance.

Managing remote employees can prove rewarding, liberating and fulfilling…or you can feel like an empty nest parent whose kids don’t stay in touch. Building teamwork, trust and trackability are three cornerstones of effective remote management of virtual employees. Learn how to build credibility and confidence with a virtual workforce. Micro-managing vs. micro-monitoring. Often, the difference between resentment and resilience occurs in the subtleties of remote employee management. If virtual employees feel “Big Brother” is watching, they will naturally tend to become defensive. On the other hand, if they feel supported and know they have a safety net, positive results are likely to follow. This class will help managers learn how to: Motivate remote employees Handle conflicts in virtual settings Communicate convincingly from afar Create a tightly-knit team that stays loose

Development of remote employees Training – methods for training remote employees, when to use each Skill vs. talent training On-going mentoring – development as a continuous process Reactionary vs. proactive Socratic coaching How to give good feedback Performance reviews and feedback – frequency, how to conduct and communicate, evaluating team Identifying skills vs talent performance Motivating remote employees Creating leaders and building ownership Empowering employees – enabling employees by giving them decision opportunities. Turning work into play Ways to reward a virtual team No vs. low vs. high cost options Public vs. private reward systems Disciplining remote employees Action plans Key items to include How to deliver How to monitor Handling conflicts between remote team members Hiring remote employees Ideal traits of the remote employee Using the remote employee skill assessment Implementing remote management skills Creating action plans, getting immediate results.

Managing Remote Employees Topics Covered Leading a remote team Setting the vision – how to communicate the team vision and keep employees focused on it in their work efforts. Creating expectations – how to clearly communicate and set performance and team expectations to ensure employees move toward common objectives correctly. Communicating WIIFMs – drive employees toward goals by communicating the benefits to them “what’s in it for me.” Communication Quantity and quality – increased communication needed with remote employees Communication vehicles – the different ways to communicate with a distributed workforce and when and how to use them Picking the appropriate option for different situations How and when to have team meetings Accessibility – establishing your credibility through commitments, guidance, and owning decisions Micro-Monitoring vs. Micro-Managing Creating and using tools to enable employees to manage themselves and track their own performance Increasing responsibility to decrease management time Setting goals – how to engage employees in their own development Managing to expectations Monitoring tools What can be monitored & how to monitor What can be managed & how to manage

SETI@home ("SETI at home") is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project

The two original goals of SETI@home were: to do useful scientific work by supporting an observational analysis to detect intelligent life outside Earth, and to prove the viability and practicality of the 'volunteer computing' concept.

With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, the project is the distributed computing project with the most participants to date. The original intent of SETI@home was to utilize 50,000-100,000 home computers.[11] Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time[when?]. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 1021 floating point operations. It is acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history.[18] With over 278,832 active computers in the system (2.4 million total) in 234 countries, as of November 14, 2009, SETI@home has the ability to compute over 769 teraFLOPS.[19] For comparison, the K computer, which as of June 20, 2011 was the world's fastest supercomputer, achieved 8.162 petaFLOPS.

For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one "owns" the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals.

much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated. In particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets for two reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer-production has an advantage in what I call "information opportunity cost." That is, it loses less information about who the best person for a given job might be than do either of the other two organizational modes. Second, there are substantial increasing returns to allow very larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and collaboration enterprises. Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators. This results in allocation gains, that increase more than proportionately with the increase in the number of individuals and resources that are part of the system. The article concludes with an overview of how these models use a variety of technological and social strategies to overcome the collective action problems usually solved in managerial and market-based systems by property and contract.

 value networks, a new way to produce and to distribute value. This section focuses on the second one. We are taking an iterative approach to solve the value accounting problem and to design and implement a sound value system, which allows individuals and small organizations to collaboratively create and distribute value. The main role of the value accounting system is to track different types of contributions, like personal, social, built and natural capital, and to compute a revenue share for all contributors, based on individual contribution. But in order to make value networks self-organize into creative and productive entities we need more than a sound value system. We are in fact developing the entire infrastructure of value networks, which includes communication, coordination and collaboration tools, a reputation system, a role system, an incentive system, a feedback system, a service system, a materials management system, a project/tasks management system, etc. All these components interact with each other and form a humane and empowering environment, in which contributing member can express their passions, exchange and collaborate to create value. We are not just dreaming about this. SENSORICA, which is sustaining a continuous growth in value and in potential since its inception, is a living proof of our model. 

Crowdsourcing came from the realization that companies (i.e. closed and hierarchical (feudal) organizations) can use the new technology to coordinate input from a very large number of entities, including a mass of individuals. The relation remains asymmetrical between the outsourceR, a closed, intrinsically individualistic organization and the outsourceE. The only thing that changes is the nature of the outsourceE. Instead of being one entity (individual or organization) executing a particular set of tasks, it is now an informal group of individuals, the crowd. In the eyes of the outsourceR the role of the outsourceE is the same. Although the different nature of the outsourceE forces the outsourceR to slightly modify its practices. There are two important patterns of crowdsourcing A company creating and maintaining it's own crowd for harvesting - the case of FIAT and its Mio project.  A web-based company offering a matchmaking service between companies' needs and the crowd - http://www.ideaken.com/   

over the crowd

which has some advantage

The enterprise collaboration space has entered an exciting new phase of collaboration. New software and applications are coming to market, as are new concepts for how to work and communicate in the knowledge age. From consumer-grade apps like those from Box.net and Huddle to software from long-established players like Microsoft and Oracle, these tools are taking collaboration technology past the traditional IT decision-making process and changing the way we approach the workday. Additional companies in this report include Skype, Huddle, Jive, Moxie and Yammer.