Is everything moving toward collaboration?

Is everything moving toward collaboration model?

Of course! Today, everything is moving toward collaboration and team-work environment.  Take youtube.com for example, would you steal from YouTube? Why would you?  YouTube is always available, and you can have it any time. I consider YouTube a mass collaborative tool; you can upload anything you want and someone else can upload something that supports or opposes your opinion.

Collaboration is not new. If we look back, from the scripts of the Agrarian era, to the Printing Press of the Industrial age, and later to the Internet, essentially launching the technological revolution, we see that collaboration has always been present in various forms. Now, in the age of Technology, the Internet provides global connectivity, allowing us to utilize the power of real time collaboration.

These days, we want to shut off lights in our homes remotely, or set a vacuum to clean automatically. We want to put an IP address on everything we own or we can connect to. We hunger for information and technology. Perhaps someday we will have a chip in a cow to find out when to milk the cow, or put solar powered GPS on it, so it can be found anywhere in the world. This hunger for information will only continue to increase, and with it, our bandwidth needs will increase.

Old websites were based on HTML, now it’s XTML. It’s all one big global super computer; we are part of the supercomputing fabric. Every time someone logs on to the Internet, they are actually populating it with more content. In 1992, when I collaborated with Dr. Leff, of Western Illinois University, on the creation ISP business, in Rushville, Illinois, we were busy constructing content for the web sites, and teaching people how to use gopher, www, telnet, ftp etc.,. Nowadays we don’t create content, we are simply caretakers or curators of the content, to index it and to manage it in a manner that’s easy for people to access. The actual content is being created by the people, for the people – truly a democratic collaboration in the world of computer networking.

How does this all link to collaboration? Well, if you use Google docs you can simply keep working on the same document with hundreds of people at the same time – this is also a form of collaboration. We can take it further to real-time collaboration. Tools such as Webex, Gotomeeting.com, and Adobe connect you to a real-time environment where you actually work with an application like Word or Excel, with multiple people, at the same time. I foresee that paid services will eventually be reduced in price, and ultimately become free, like conferencefree.com, due to the nature of our technological transition. In the same regard, surfing the web has transitioned from simply searching for a website, to being engulfed into the vast connectivity that is the World Wide Web.

We humans have become multi-media humans, with ambient computing.  Internet has also brought civic engagement upon us with innovative ideas to help ourselves.  Who needs a supply chain when we can work in collaborative teams, within peer initiated boundaries? We live in world of collaboration, openness, interdependence and sharing. However, this world of collaboration will not work unless we work with integrity and responsibility.