Collaboration

Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal.[1] It is a recursive[2] process where two or more people
or organizations work together to realize shared goals, (this is more than the intersection of common goals
seen in co-operative ventures, but a deep, collective, determination to reach an identical objective[by whom?][original
research?]
) — for example, an intriguing[improper synthesis?]
endeavor[3][4] that is creative in nature[5]—by sharing
knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of
leadership can be social within adecentralized and egalitarian group.[6] In particular, teams that work
collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite
resources.[7] Collaboration is also present in opposing goals exhibiting the notion of adversarial collaboration,
though this is not a common case for using the word.

Structured methods of collaboration encourage introspection of behavior and communication.[6] These

methods specifically aim to increase the success of teams as they engage in collaborative problem solving.
Forms, rubrics, charts and graphs are useful in these situations to objectively documentpersonal traits with the
goal of improving performance in current and future projects.

Since the Second World War the term "Collaboration" acquired a very negative meaning as referring to persons
and groups which help a foreign occupier of their country—due to actual use by people in European countries
who worked with and for the Nazi German occupiers. Linguistically, "collaboration" implies more or less equal
partners who work together—which is obviously not the case when one party is an army of occupation and the
other are people of the occupied country living under the power of this army.

In order to make a distinction, the more specific term Collaborationism is often used for this phenomenon of
collaboration with an occupying army. However, there is no water-tight distinction; "Collaboration" and
"Collaborator", as well as "Collaborationism" and "Collaborationist", are often used in this pejorative sense—
and even more so, the equivalent terms in French and other languages spoken in countries which experienced
direct Nazi occupation.

Classical examples of collaboration

Following are some examples of successful collaboration efforts in the past.

Trade
Trade originated with the start of communication inprehistoric times. Trading was the main facility of prehistoric
people, who bartered goods and services from each other when there was no such thing as the modern day
currency. Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago.[8]Trade
exists for many reasons. Due to specialisation and division of labor, most people concentrate on a small aspect
of production, trading for other products. Trade exists between regions because different regions have
acomparative advantage in the production of some tradable commodity, or because different regions' size
allows for the benefits of mass production. As such, trade at market prices between locations benefits both
locations.

Community organization

Organization and cooperation between community members provides economic and social benefits

The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political or spiritual vision. They also

share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include cohousing, residential land
trusts,ecovillages, communes, kibbutzim, ashrams, and housing cooperatives. Typically, new members of an
intentional community are selected by the community's existing membership, rather than by real-estate agents
or land owners (if the land is not owned by the community).

Hutterite, Austria (16th century)

Housing units are built and assigned to individual families but belong to the colony and there is very little
personal property. Meals are taken by the entire colony in a common long room.

Oneida Community, Oneida, New York (1848)

The Oneida Community practiced Communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions)
and Mutual Criticism, where every member of the community was subject to criticism by committee or the
community as a whole, during a general meeting. The goal was to eliminate bad character traits.

Early Kibbutz settlements founded near Jerusalem (1890)

A Kibbutz is an Israeli collective community. The movement combines socialism and Zionism in a form of

practical Labor Zionism, founded at a time when independent farming was not practical or perhaps more
correctly—not practicable. Forced by necessity into communal life, and inspired by their own ideology, the
kibbutz members developed a pure communal mode of living that attracted interest from the entire world. While
the kibbutzim lasted for several generations as utopiancommunities, most of today's kibbutzim are scarcely
different from the capitalist enterprises and regular towns to which the kibbutzim were originally supposed to be
alternatives.[citation needed]
[edit]Game theory
 This section does
not cite anyreferences or
sources.(November 2007)

Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics and economics that looks at situations where multiple
players make decisions in an attempt to maximize their returns. The first documented discussion of it is a
letter written by James Waldegrave, 1st Earl Waldegrave in 1713. Antoine Augustin
Cournot's Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth in 1838 provided the first
general theory. It was not until 1928 that this became a recognized, unique field when John von
Neumann published a series of papers. Von Neumann's work in game theory culminated in the 1944 book
The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by von Neumann andOskar Morgenstern.

[edit]Military-industrial complex
This section needs
additionalcitations for verification.
(November 2007)

The term military-industrial complex refers to a close and symbiotic relationship among a nation'sarmed

forces, its private industry, and associated political and commercial interests. In such a system, the
military is dependent on industry to supply material and other support, while the defense industry depends
on government for revenue.

Skunk Works

Skunk Works is a term used in engineering and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given
a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret
projects. Founded at Lockheed Martin in 1943, the team developed highly innovative aircraft in short time
frames, even beating its first deadline by 37 days.[9] Creator of the organization, Kelly Johnson is said to have
been an 'organizing genius' and had fourteen basic operating rules.[9]

Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was the project to develop the first nuclear weapon (atomic bomb) during World War II
by the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer
District, it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1941–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The scientific research was directed
by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

While the aforementioned persons were influential in the project itself, the value of this project as an influence
on organized collaboration is better attributed to Vannevar Bush.[9] In early 1940, Bush lobbied for the creation
of the National Defense Research Committee. Frustrated by previous bureaucratic failures in implementing
technology in World War I, Bush sought to organize the scientific power of the United States for greater
success.[9]

The project succeeded in developing and detonating three nuclear weapons in 1945: a test detonation of
a plutonium implosion bomb on July 16 (the Trinity test) near Alamogordo, New Mexico; an enriched
uranium bomb code-named "Little Boy" on August 6 over Hiroshima, Japan; and a second plutonium bomb,
code-named "Fat Man" on August 9 over Nagasaki, Japan.
[edit]Project management

The 2,751 Liberty ships built in four years by the United States during World War II required new approaches in
organization and manufacturing

As a discipline, Project Management developed from different fields of application including construction,
engineering, and defense. In the United States, the forefather of project management is Henry Gantt, called the
father of planning and control techniques, who is famously known for his use of the "bar" chart as a project
management tool, for being an associate of Frederick Winslow Taylor's theories of scientific management, and
for his study of the work and management of Navy ship building. His work is the forerunner to many modern
project management tools including the work breakdown structure (WBS) and resource allocation.

The 1950s marked the beginning of the modern project management era. Again, in the United States, prior to
the 1950s, projects were managed on an ad hoc basis using mostly Gantt charts, and informal techniques and
tools. At that time, two mathematical project scheduling models were developed: (1) the "Program Evaluation
and Review Technique" or PERT, developed as part of theUnited States Navy's (in conjunction with
the Lockheed Corporation) Polaris missile submarine program;[10] and (2) the "Critical Path Method" (CPM)
developed in a joint venture by both DuPont Corporation and Remington Rand Corporation for managing plant
maintenance projects. These mathematical techniques quickly spread into many private enterprises.

In 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) was formed to serve the interest of the project management
industry. The premise of PMI is that the tools and techniques of project management are common even among
the widespread application of projects from the software industry to the construction industry. In 1981, the PMI
Board of Directors authorized the development of what has become A Guide to the Project Management Body
of Knowledge (PMBOK), containing the standards and guidelines of practice that are widely used throughout
the profession. The International Project Management Association (IPMA), founded in Europe in 1967, has
undergone a similar development and instituted the IPMA Project Baseline. Both organizations are now
participating in the development of a global project management standard.

[edit]Academia

Black Mountain College

Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier and other former faculty of Rollins College, Black
Mountain was experimental by nature and committed to an interdisciplinaryapproach, attracting a faculty which
included many of America's leading visual artists, poets, and designers.

Operating in a relatively isolated rural location with little budget, Black Mountain College inculcated an informal
and collaborative spirit, and over its lifetime attracted a venerable roster of instructors. Some of the innovations,
relationships and unexpected connections formed at Black Mountain would prove to have a lasting influence on
the postwar American art scene, high culture, and eventually pop culture. Buckminster Fuller met
student Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain, and the result was the first geodesic dome (improvised out of slats
in the school's back yard);Merce Cunningham formed his dance company; and John Cage staged his
first happening.

Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school
that grew out of the progressive education movement. In its day it was a unique educational experiment for the
artists and writers who conducted it, and as such an important incubator for the American avant garde. Black
Mountain proved to be an important precursor to and prototype for many of the alternative colleges of today
ranging from the University of California, Santa Cruz to Hampshire College and Evergreen State College,
among others.

Learning Community

The Evergreen signature clock tower

Dr. Wolff-Michael Roth and Stuart Lee of the University of Victoria assert[11] that until the early 1990s the
individual was the 'unit of instruction' and the focus of research. The two observed that researchers and
practitioners switched[12][13] to the idea that knowing is 'better' thought of as a cultural practice.[14][15][16][17]Roth and
Lee also claim[11] that this led to changes in learning and teaching design in which students were encouraged to
share their ways of doing mathematics, history, science, with each other. In other words, that children take part
in the construction of consensual domains, and 'participate in the negotiation and institutionalisation of …
meaning'. In effect, they are participating in learning communities.

This analysis does not take account of the appearance of Learning communities in the United States in the
early 1980s. For example, The Evergreen State College, which is widely considered a pioneer in this area,
established an intercollegiate learning community in 1984. In 1985, this same college established The
Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, which focuses on collaborative
education approaches, including learning communities as one of its centerpieces.
[edit]Classical music
Main article:  Classical music written in collaboration

Although relatively rare compared with collaboration in popular music, there have been some notable examples
of music written in collaboration between classical composers. Perhaps the best-known examples are:

 Hexameron, a set of variations for solo piano on a theme from Vincenzo Bellini's opera I puritani. It

was written and first performed in 1837. The contributors were Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin,Carl
Czerny, Sigismond Thalberg, Johann Peter Pixis, and Henri Herz.

 The F-A-E Sonata, a sonata for violin and piano, written in 1853 as a gift for the violinist Joseph
Joachim. The composers were Albert Dietrich (first movement), Robert Schumann (second and fourth
movements), and Johannes Brahms (third movement).
[edit]Contemporary examples

This section needs
additionalcitations for verification.
(November 2007)

[edit]Arts
 A piece of collaborative art created by students in Currier House at Harvard University

Collaboration—or joint production by two or more artists—is a common style among musicians and
performance artists. It has not been so popular, on the other hand, in the world of art, and especially in modern
art. But the strong sense of individualism long possessed by artists of fine art began to wane around the 1960s,
and some artists working in units have emerged and become widely known along with the development of new
media based on the advances in information technology. They have changed the concept of art into something
that can be engaged in by more than individual artists alone.

[edit]Art groups

This section needs
additionalcitations for verification.
(November 2007)

Fluxus

An international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and
disciplines in the 1960s. Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity.
Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility,
disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. As Fluxus
artist Robert Filliou wrote, however, Fluxus differed from Dada in its richer set of aspirations, and the positive
social and communitarian aspirations of Fluxus far outweighed the anti-art tendency that also marked the
group.

Just Buffalo Literary Center, CEPA Gallery, and Big Orbit are three nonprofit arts organizations in Buffalo, New
York, that have shared space and certain administrative functions since 2005. Just Buffalo offers an array of
literary arts and arts-in-education programs. CEPA Gallery presents contemporary photo-related art and
supports working artists. And Big Orbit has an art gallery and programs in the fields of experimental theater,
literary performance, new music and sound art.

Once they co-located their administrative offices they quickly started to realize a number of advantages.
Financial savings was an obvious one (they share equipment, a software contract, phone and Internet services
and more). Physical proximity also helped the three executives develop a strong sense of trust and respect,
and they soon looked for other ways to collaborate, such as hiring a shared grant writer who brings in grants for
all three organizations.

There have been many benefits: financial savings because of their shared space, increased donations, and
improved artistic programming. Beyond the tangible benefits, there are important intangibles. The agency
directors share information and ideas, and they coordinate mailings. Perhaps most important, the organizations
have increased their creativity; being in the same space has led to a "think tank" atmosphere. One of the three
directors notes that "We work so closely … it's helped us come up with new thinking to expand our capacity
and create a built-in brain trust and support system for problem solving and practical help."

Situationist International

The Situationist International (SI) was a small group of international political and artisticagitators with roots
in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th century European artistic and politicalavant-gardes. Formed in 1957,
the SI was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. In the
1960s it split into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational and
the Second Situationist International. The first SI disbanded in 1972.[18]

See also Experiments in Art and Technology, Dada and Colab.

[edit]Business

Collaboration in business can be found both inter- and intra-organization[19] and ranges from the simplicity of
a partnership and crowd funding to the complexity of a multinational corporation. Collaboration between team
members allows for better communication within the organization and throughout the supply chains. It is a way
of coordinating different ideas from numerous people to generate a wide variety of knowledge. Collaboration
with a selected few firms as opposed to collaboration with a large number of different firms has been shown to
positively impact firm performance and innovation outcomes.[20] The recent improvement in technology has
provided the world with high speed internet, wireless connection, and web-based collaboration tools like blogs,
and wikis, and has as such created a "mass collaboration." People from all over the world are efficiently able to
communicate and share ideas through the internet, or even conferences, without any geographical barriers.
The power of social networks it beginning to permeate into business culture where many collaborative uses are
being found including file sharing and knowledge transfer.

See also : Management cybernetics

A plethora of studies have shown that collaboration is a powerful tool towards higher achievement and
increased productivity since collective efficacy can significantly boost groups’ aspirations, motivational
investment, morale, and resilience to challenges. [21]

[edit]Education

Generally defined, an Educational Collaborative Partnership is ongoing involvement

between schoolsand business/industry, unions, governments and community organizations. Educational
Collaborative Partnerships are established by mutual agreement between two or more parties to work together
on projects and activities that will enhance the quality of education for students while improving skills critical to
success in the workplace.[by whom?]

Collaboration in Education- two or more co-equal individual voluntarily brings their knowledge and experience
together by interacting toward a common goal in the best interest of students for the betterment of their
education success. Students achieve team building and communication skills meeting many curricular
standards. Students have the ability to practice real-world communication experiences. Students gain
leadership through collaboration and empowers peer to peer learning.[third-party source needed]

When collaborating in education, according to ISTE NEST-S and NEST-T standards, there is cultural
understanding by engaging learners with other cultures and develop technology in enriched learning
environments.[third-party source needed]

Societal changes that have taken place over the past few decades allows new ways of conceptualizing
collaboration, and to understand the evolution and expansion of these types of relationships. For example,
economic changes that have taken place domestically and internationally have resulted in the transformation
from an industry-dependent economy to an information-centered economy that is dependent on new
technologies and expansion of industries that provide services.[22]From an educational standpoint, such
transformations were projected through federal reports, such as A Nation at Risk in 1983 and What Matters
Most: Teaching for America’s Future in 1996. In these reports, economic success could be assured if students
developed the capacity to learn how to “manage teams… and…work together successfully in teams”.[23]

The continuing development of Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, multiplayer games, online
communities, and Twitter, among others, has changed the manner in which students communicate and
collaborate.

See also :

 Collaborative Partnerships: Business/Industry-Education

 Learning circle
[edit]Music

Main article:  Classical music written in collaboration

Musical collaboration occurs when musicians in different places or groups work on the same album or song.
Collaboration between musicians, especially with regards to jazz, is often heralded as the epitome of complex
collaborative practice. Special websites as well as software have been created to facilitate musical
collaboration over the Internet resulting in the emergence of Online Bands.

Several awards exist specifically for collaboration in music:

 Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals—awarded since 1988

 Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals—awarded since 1995

 Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration—awarded since 2002

[edit]Entertainment
Collaboration in entertainment is a relatively new phenomenon brought on with the advent of social media,
reality TV, and video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Collaboration occurs when writers, directors,
actors, producers and other individuals or groups work on the same television show, short film, or feature
length film. A revolutionary system has been developed by Will Wright for the production of the TV series title
Bar Karma on CurrentTV. Special web-based software, titled Storymaker, has been written to facilitate plot
collaboration over the Internet. Organizations such asOrange County Screenwriters Association bring together
professional and amateur writers and filmmakers in a collaborative manner for entertainment development.

[edit]Publishing

Collaboration in publishing can be as simple as dual-authorship or as complex as commons-based peer

production. Technological examples include Usenet, e-mail lists, blogs and Wikis while 'brick and mortar'
examples include monographs (books) and periodicals such as newspapers, journals and magazines.

[edit]Science

Though there is no political institution organizing the sciences on an international level, a self-organized, global
network had formed in the late 20th century.[7] Observed by the rise in co-authorships in published papers,
Wagner and Leydesdorff found international collaborations to have doubled from 1990 to 2005.
[7]
 While collaborative authorships within nations has also risen, this has done so at a slower rate and is not
cited as frequently.[7]

[edit]Medicine

In medicine the physician assistant - physician relationship involves a collaborative plan to be on file with

each state board of medicine where the PA works. This plan formally delineates the scope of practice approved
by the physician.

[edit]Technology

Due to the complexity of today's business environment, collaboration in technology encompasses a broad
range of tools that enable groups of people to work together including social networking, instant messaging,
team spaces, web sharing, audio conferencing, video, and telephony. Broadly defined, any technology that
facilitates linking of two or more humans to work together can be considered a collaborative tool. Wikipedia,
Blogs, even Twitter are collaborative tools. Many large companies are developing enterprise collaboration
strategies and standardizing on a collaboration platform to allow their employees, customers and partners to
intelligently connect and interact.

Enterprise collaboration tools are centered around attaining collective intelligence and staff collaboration at the
organization level, or with partners. These include features such as staff networking, expert recommendations,
information sharing, expertise location, peer feedback, and real-time collaboration. At the personal level, this
enables employees to enhance social awareness and their profiles and interactions Collaboration
encompasses both asynchronous and synchronous methods of communication and serves as an umbrella
term for a wide variety of software packages. Perhaps the most commonly associated form of synchronous
collaboration is web conferencing using tools such as Cisco TelePresence, Cisco WebEx Meetings, HP Halo
Telepresence Solutions, GoToMeeting Web Conferencing, or Microsoft Live Meeting, but the term can easily
be applied to IP telephony, instant messaging, and rich video interaction with telepresence, as well. Examples
of asynchronous collaboration software include Cisco WebEx Connect, GoToMeeting, Microsoft
Sharepoint and MediaWiki.

The effectiveness of a collaborative effort is driven by three critical factors: - Communication - Content
Management - Workflow control

The Internet

The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills has made collaborative work
dramatically easier. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and test, but the wide reach of the Internet
allows such groups to easily form in the first place, even among niche interests. An example of this is the free
software movement in software development which produced GNU and Linux from scratch and has taken over
development of Mozilla andOpenOffice.org (formerly known as Netscape Communicator and StarOffice).

Commons-based peer production

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Yale's Law professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new
model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually
with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or
financial compensation. He compares this to firm production (where a centralized decision process decides
what has to be done and by whom) andmarket-based production (when tagging different prices to different jobs
serves as an attractor to anyone interested in doing the job).

Examples of products created by means of commons-based peer production include Linux,

acomputer operating system; Slashdot, a news and announcements website; Kuro5hin, a discussion site for
technology and culture; Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia; and Clickworkers, a collaborative scientific work.
Another example is Socialtext which is a software that uses tools such as wikis and weblogs and helps
companies to create a collaborative work environment.

Massively distributed collaboration

The term massively distributed collaboration was coined by Mitchell Kapor, in a presentation atUC Berkeley on
2005-11-09, to describe an emerging activity of wikis and electronic mailing listsand blogs and other content-
creating virtual communities online.