Collaboration Group First Progress Report (03/14/2005)

Group Members

Adam Torgerson, Scotty Allen, Phong Le, and David West.

Progress to Date


We have spent most of our time reading to learn the lay of the land. So far, one major breakthrough to our progress has been discovering the work of Howard Rheingold, an expert on technological social movements. Rheingold was an early participant of the seminal online community The Well, and has written many books related to the intersection of society, computers, technology, and politics; often with a grassroots bent but informed by social science research. Through his works Rheingold has focused on not only the formation of community across time and space, but how these communities serve as organization memories or a form of distributed cognition (he termed this phenomena "grassroots groupmind" in The Virtual Community).

In a recent book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Rheingold uses "flash mobs" as a starting point to look at the evolution of the concept of communities in the evolving internet age. Rheingold argues that while flash mobs may look like random emergent phenomena, a closer look reveals that these phenomena can be better understood in the context of a long historical debates on "public goods, social network capital, and knowledge capital" and why people act for collective benefit when they may not be easily discernable invididual benefits. Rheingold believes that understanding this collective action motivation has deep enduring implications for understanding technology facilitated, possibly virtual, often emergent communities in Internet age and the economic and political context and dynamic that leads to their creation. He follows his analysis by urging readers to collaborate, via emerging computer, wireless, and mobile technologies, to influence public policy to ensure that the sustenance of a open society rather than one dominated by economic interest of transglobal corporation.

We plan to use's Rheingold's analysis and some of the sources that he used as theoritical underpinning to examine and understand specific instances of these collective action events. One instance that we would like to learn more about it is the annual Prix Ars Electronica International Competition for CyberArts and its Digital Communities competition. Desigend to support and bolster technologically enhanced collaboration and communication between people worldwide, it urges groups with social, cultural, and political projects to submit work related to many phenomena and fields of activity including open-source, creative-commons, social software, emergent democracy, digital cities/urban development projects, and citizen involvement initiatives/citizen conferences. The competition has a substantial prize, and the entries are due March 18th. We think that seeing the results will be very useful for our research.

Our research has also led us to a case study regarding class, politics, and technology in New Haven, Connecticut (see Peter Hall's homepage). The paper, which was published in 2001 and deals with fairly rudimentary technology compared to mobile phones and wireless handhelds, does not predict that tehnology will make a mass social upheaval possible for the disenfranchised (download the paper here). At least not in New Haven. Nevertheless, proper social upheavals are happening very frequently in places like Latin America, and we may choose to focus on these, as well as other topics suggested in Howard Rheingolds book "Smart Mobs."

Tentative Topic Focus

Smart Mobs (term coined by Howard Rheingold)

Research Strategy and Planned Activities

We plan to further investigate Rheingolds work, and to pay close attention to the winners of the Digital Communities portion of the Prix Ars Electronica. We also may plan to delegate responsibility for more information gathering, and we will further refine our topic.

Possible Delegation of Responsibility

  1. Adam Torgerson - Open-source and Smart Mobs. Existing programs, developer culture.
  2. Scotty Allen - Successful political empowerment through Smart Mobs.
  3. Phong Le - Feasability of implementation of different incarnations of Smart Mobs. Smart mobs and Art.
  4. David West - The History of Smart Mobs and similar things.