The course, Toward a Literacy of Cooperation HUM 202, starts today. It will be running at Stanford University but materials from the course will be made available online so anyone interested is welcome to participate.

Scientists are beginning to see how cooperation actually works in biology, sociology, mathematics, psychology, economics, computer science and political science. And in the last two decades, we’ve seen a variety of new challenges to business models that stress competition over customers, resources, and ideas. Companies in emerging high-tech industries learned that working with competitors could build markets and help avoid costly standards wars. The open source movement showed that world-class software could be built without corporate oversight or market incentives. Google and Amazon built fortunes by drawing on, even improving, the Internet by facilitating and building on the collective actions of millions of web publishers and reviewers. Thousands of volunteers have created over one million pages of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia - in over 100 languages. Collective knowledge-gathering, sharing economies, social software, prediction markets - numerous experiments in technology-assisted cooperation are taking place.

In this lecture series we want to begin to put these pieces of the puzzle together to build a practical map of cooperative strategy…

Howard Rheingold, who will be one of the speakers, sets the scene and puts the course context over at Smart Mobs:

The global Internet brought the advent of many-to-many capability: every desktop or mobile device linked to the network is now a worldwide multimedia printing press, broadcasting station, place of assembly, marketplace. That power is untethering, leaping off desktops into our hands. The mobile telephone is in the process of morphing into a wirelessly networked supercomputer in a billion pockets. As I noted in 2001, the most important new technologies will not be hardware or software but social practices. Understanding these practices early in the history of the new medium could be crucial.

In the past, invention raced so much faster than understanding of their effects that new media made social changes possible decades or centuries before anyone tried to make sense of the changes. If we are at the threshold of societal changes as disruptive as those enabled by the alphabet and the printing press, can we gain understanding of the new media early enough to influence these changes?

Well worth checking out!