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Collaborative futures part II

Limits of participation
How important is participation? Positive and negative participation. Think of facebook with only the ability to like something but never dislike.  It is mentioned how participation idealizes harmony and unison. Is this what everyone wants for a successful collaborative effort? Is conflict and dissent important for project development?
First things first
‘Sharing of content does not directly lead to collaboration’ work that was done alone, stands alone and is not collaborative.
Aggregated content, like hashtagged tweets, blog posts begin to lend to collaboration in a massive way because they lose their relevance and significance outside of their individual systems context. But how important is context?
Coordinating mechanisms create context.
Creating the context for threads of collaborative content, requires technical and social coordination and mediation. Wikipedia is cited as an example of technically mediated coordination, simply think of the editing process and the logging of edit history and the ability to revert from a diff.
If you think about the five pillars then you find the tenets of wikipedias social contract. As editors we are striving for a more factual and accurate online resource.

Does aggregation constitute collaboration?
Even after having a defined context does aggregated content become collaborative? Here’s where the example raised by Christina comes up of Kutiman’s sampling of multiple youtube videos coalescing into a music video unbeknownst to the original creators of youtube media.
This brings the idea of intention into the concept of collaboration. How important is intention for collaboration?
When you include hashtags in your tweets in most cases there is the intention of contributing the agglomeration of whatever it is you are tagging. Think about the creation of the concept of the hashtag. It was the goal of the programmer to allow the linking of tweets and thereby foster a network and community beyond sporadic individual expression. This raises the question of how of important is the setting of goals to collaboration. Personal goals define intention, but when they overlap amongst different members of a team and become shared goals, is it only then that collaboration is truly conceived?

Collaborationism
After having discussed the importance of intention, the converse would be looking at the repercussions of collaboration. When one considers the possibility of collaborating on multiple projects, these endeavors confer both the different group and individual indentities. In the context of online collaboration and the coordination facilitated by software services, hashing out one’s identity in a group or the group’s identity from another, becomes an interesting challenge. Think of facebook groups, friendships and the binary nature of interaction, ‘liking’ someone’s post etc. Are these adequate reflections of real social interactions?

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