the future of cooperation

Q: "What is the most important learning or insight from your field about cooperation?"

A: "Cooperation and collective action will emerge spontaneously among people using electronic communications media, in rough proportion to the number of people connected by the medium, the level of openness or standardization in the underlying technical protocols of the system, and the ability of people to create and share the information content of the medium. Reed's Law suggests that value in "group forming networks" such as the Internet grows exponentially with the number of interconnected people in the network.

In the coming era of ubiquitous computing and communications, unprecedented cooperation among normally self-interested entities will be required to establish the required openness and standardization of the technical infrastructure."

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