Second Life Future Salon: March 30th: Howard Rheingold at the SL Future Salon!

While Jerry has been goofing off at Etech, SXSW, and GDC (not to mention starting new blogs,) I've been hard at work on the next SL Future Salon!

I'm extremely excited to announce that we have Howard Rheingold of Smart Mobs and The Virtual Community fame coming inworld to tell us "a new story about how humans get things done!!!" (my own punctuation.) Howard recently launched a project in collaboration with the Institute for the Future called the Cooperation Commons which seeks to better understand cooperation and collective action.

"Even a small increase in our understanding of the dynamics of cooperation and collective action could have enormous payoffs in regard to international relations and conflict-resolution, the evolution of economic institutions, and the future of democratic governance and civil society. The Cooperation Project, a collaboration between the Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold, proposes to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. We do this by compiling and synthesizing current knowledge, mapping the outlines of the emerging field, convening meetings of the best minds in relevant disciplines, and encouraging ongoing discourse, research, and practice.

Problems of health care, economic development, political and interpersonal conflict, environmental sustainability, resource allocation, disaster relief, urban planning, civil society, democratic governance, technological innovation, intellectual property, public education—the most critical problems of our time—
involve social dilemmas and institutions for collective action that are not yet well-understood.

Evidence from biology, sociology, economics, political science, computer science, and psychology suggest the feasibility of building an interdisciplinary framework for understanding cooperation. Because of institutional specialization, a program of cooperation studies will not happen without purposeful action. In order to catalyze the growth of this enterprise, the Cooperation Project has created:

An open, shared, knowledge base of insights and resources relevant to cooperation and collective action: the Knowledge Commons

Several visual maps for customized navigation of the cooperation studies landscape

A university course with publicly available lecture videos and readings

A workshop and guidebook for re-perceiving the role of cooperation in business and the technologies that enable it

The beginnings of a social network of cooperation researchers

The Cooperation Project has convened expert workshops, published a syllabus, launched online discussion communities, compiled reports, created and published video lectures, and built software prototypes— the beginnings of a Cooperation Toolset. Now we seek to:

Test and refine these instruments through workshops and further research.

Attract the best minds in cooperation-related disciplines to help.

Learn how practitioners can use the knowledge and tools in their domains.

Make these resources public and invite broad participation."