Martin Roulleaux Dugage provides a very interesting definition of a community versus a network or a group. A community is a network that has decided to auto-organize by adopting 6 attributes:

You are whether in or out the community

Why do we decide to stick together in the first place ? What meaning does it have ?

Community members are committed to achieve something. In that respect, for instance, active Wikipedians form a community, since they edit articles and create new ones on a regular basis.

Community is no jungle. Social interactions are governed by a set of rules, or an etiquette.

Community members share words. It can be a jargon. At any rate, it helps them communicate and create a feeling of belonging.

A difficult, exciting, controversial video about the impact of singularity on evolution, consciousness and the future of social and political organization, starring Ray Kurzweil and Gödel, among others.

Warning: requires attention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDqaMFHGEZ8

Singularity seems inevitable, for better of for worse. But for a dramatic war and the return of a dark age ?

The Washington University just launched a program to help design more productive and resistant breeds of rice. The project is a partnership with IBM and aims at creating a grid of one million computers within two years. This grid will be equivalent to a 167 teraflop CPU.

More about this: World Community Grid to Tackle Rice Crisis

The ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy is distinguished by its regularity and its foreseeable nature . These two characteristics reinforce mutual confidence between partners. They also result in a network in which all relationships are not equal. Relationships maintained on a long term basis by repeated cooperative actions are worth potentially more than new relationships. It is a lesson which serial networkers from such social networks as LinkedIn and Viadeo would do well to contemplate. What is the use of having hundreds of connections in our network if nothing occurs after having added them? Such a social network behaves like a brain in which no nerve impulse circulates between the neurons.

Yet, regularity and foreseeability can be seriously thwarted by our passions and impulsive, chaotic reactions.

Who among us has never answered in an abrupt way to a misunderstood e-mail because we were in bad mood at the time, for reasons entirely unrelated with the sender of the message?

This kind of behavior creates misunderstandings which are real false notes in the cooperation.

In the long run, however, the fact that partners are able to overcome these sudden starts reinforces confidence. After all, we are only human.

To resist the damage born from passions, there may be a temptation to contain them. And sometimes it is not possible to react immediately. To illustrate my point of view, I will analyze a personal case. Not long ago it happened to me that a partner infringed on one of my cardinal values, the appetite for freedom. The ridiculous part of it is that this partner probably wanted to please me. In fact, it concerned the organization of an event in my honor, but to which I had been opposed because I thought the timing was not right. Believing to do well in surprising me, my partner ignored my opposition. In that, he actually “aggressed” me. My reaction was to keep up a good image during the event, and to explode later on, out of context, against my partner. I could not react immediately and with the same intensity to what I had perceived as an aggression. All that happened as if I had not been able to sufficiently communicate my interests (to see my freedom respected). My later explosion was completely unintelligible to my partner.

What this example shows is first that cooperation is sometimes disturbed by an emotional background noise inside each participant. Taking it into account allows one to restart on a cooperative mode, even after a desertion. What is important is the quality of the relationship on a long term.

Second, the fact of not being able or not wanting to respond to a desertion from a partner creates an emotional load. If the emotional loads accumulate, they are sometimes released at the worst time. I refer by that to Eric Bern’s transactional analysis theory.

In other words, to answer a partner impulsively or to restrain ourselves from reacting (or to be restrained) is to take the risk of falling from Charybde (passions) to Scylla (restraining of passions). It is all a matter of balance and timing to express and make our passions understandable, which necessarily permeate the relationship.

To paraphrase French writer Gide, bad cooperation is done with beautiful feeling. More exactly, cooperation is not in the realm of sentiment. The example of the software tournaments organized by Axelrod proves it well enough: programmed robots with no emotions can demonstrate cooperative behavior. We will even see in a future paper that passion can thwart cooperation. Nevertheless, man is made of passion as much if not more than of reason. Whether we are delighted or must resign ourselves to it, it is that way. Thus the emotive dimension has necessarily an impact on cooperation. If cooperation is not about intentions, it is about communication of intentions. It is not only a matter of cooperating by acts but also of making known one’s intention to cooperate.

The plot thickens when we consider that cooperating with someone consists in carrying out an action favorable to his/her interests and that, conversely, a hostile behavior must be punished immediately by a hostile behavior of the same intensity. The problem is that everything is a matter of judgment:

When we try to function in a cooperative mode with our partners, we should act in such a way that our actions are as understandable as possible. That requires certain competences in psychology and communication, to convey the right message: I acted in such way with you and I explain why to you.

clipped from www.smartmobs.com Is Facebook Doomed? Always-On Panopticon…or Cooperation Amplifier Robert Scoble just wrote a post that says his Facebook usage has been going down and he asks Is Facebook doomed? On the other hand, I did some research of my own using comScore MyMetrix and was able to see that Facebook and MySpace usage is down for home usage and at universities, but NOT AT WORK - Facebook Traffic is leveling off, at other Social Networks too - are people losing interest? But like I said over at The Analytics Guru - Usage of Facebook and MySpace is sharply UP at work! This comes from my own data pull right out of comScore: comScore Trend Report - 1 year - usage of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn at WORK So while overall usage is down - as reported in the US and UK (according to comScore) the use of Social Networks is UP, according to comScore - for use in your carrier.

Is the increasing usage of Facebook in the workplace a sign that the network is more and more used for career-oriented purposes or just a sign that people are also bored…with their job ?

This paper is the first of a series of three articles originally published in French on cooperation and its issues in everyday life. In the present article, we will reconsider cooperation theory as brilliantly studied by
Robert Axelrod . Among other achievements, Robert Axelrod is the author of the book The Evolution of Cooperation.

The book reviews various strategies of interaction between members of a group. Among these strategies, there is the model called “tit-for-tat”. The principle of tit-for-tat cooperation consists in interacting in a cooperative mode with a partner as long as he/she does the same. At the first defection, the model suggests reacting immediately and with the same intensity; then, at the next turn, re-proposing cooperation. In any event, with this model, one never attacks first, one reacts to the first aggression and then starts again in a cooperative mode.

In his book, Robert Axelrod showed that this strategy was effective and could be essential, even in absence of friendship or love, on the sole strength of interests well understood by both parties. This model brings a long-term value and lasting benefit to human groups.

Axelrod describes and analyzes tournaments organized in the 1980s between artificial agents (small software), each having its own strategy. Some always cooperated, whatever the other’s behavior. To some extent, even when they were hit, they turned the other cheek; others always cooperated to a certain point where they deserted, “betraying” their partners; still others had a random behavior, etc. In the end, the model known as tit-for-tat proved to be one of the most robust.

As human beings, we can choose this strategy consciously, without being programmed. But is it so simple? Of course not. Next week, we will start surveying limits which hinder us in our willingness to cooperate.