Project

Share: Socio-Technical Tools for Loosely Bound Cooperation

We are looking to better enable cooperation between individuals working in the same domain yet having differing goals. Tools for collaboration are mainly focused on groups with a single shared goal, however we observe cooperation between individuals occurring in much broader spheres. Our work will take the form of a networked programming environment where all code is shared; the goal is to develop tools and techniques that make it easy to leverage the work of others, as well as provide value (both social and technical) for making one's work available to the collective. In particular we want to make more visible the act of appropriation, and also make it easier for individuals to track the evolution of their contributions. We believe that by making appropriation more explicitly visible we can translate contributions into a form of social capital and thus encourage cooperation between otherwise unconnected individuals.