I happened to see Quantum of Solace last night and, at the dinner afterwards, with two friends and two teenage boys, we began asking lots of questions about filmic continuity, geography, and politics. This morning, I went to Wikipedia for some answers and they were all there, in this weighty entry on the latest Bond movie. That exploration led to another, and another, and another, and I began thinking more about collaboration by difference, the HASTAC model and the one, I suppose, that I'm responsible for pushing and exploring and, of course, writing about, not only in this blog but in papers and in some books that will be coming out soon. Here are this chilly Sunday morning's thoughts on one of my favorite subjects.

First, I do not think collaboration is intrinsically and in all situations the ideal method. Sometimes going inside oneself and being solitary is the best way to arrive at a major, conceptual breakthrough. (I've blogged a lot about that this year as well, in my "Thinking on Leave" postings about the necessity, after a few decades of being so engaged with the academic world, of needing this year to read, to think, to walk, to disengage in order to reengage, what Toffler calls learning, unlearning, and relearning.) Collaboration is useful when it works but is not the only method that works.

Second, I agree with many of the conclusions in the splendid studies by Jonathon Cummings that collaboration sometimes accentuates commonalities. And that is not always a good thing. That is, if there are inherent, shared assumptions, collaboration can reinforce rather than contest those assumptions. He works with distributed, multiuniversity, multidisciplinary science teams that do research together and sometimes their "weak ties" lead to work that takes longer and, in some situations, is narrower in its final, net ambitions than it might otherwise have been. I love his research and follow it avidly and I sometimes read his conclusions a little differently than he does (that's a funny sentence, no?). I think one reason for the inefficiencies of collaboration is rooted in the unarticulated form of those collaborations. In certain kinds of collaborative work, everyone compromises at the edges. I'm not even sure if those entering the collaboration are aware of constant self-adjustments they are making in the course of a collaboration (Dan Gilbert's work and also Dan Ariely's would suggest they aren't aware of it at all). During my years as an administrator, I saw this a lot. Sometimes you aimed very high but, given budget, personnel, rules, timelines, and circumstances, you ended up with something more circumscribed, less lofty, but workable and, in the end, actually working. The difference between theory and practice is often a matter of smoothing out edges, even edges that sometimes would have made the project more interesting but pose insurmountable obstacles to its successful implementation. As someone once said, you can't always get what you want but, if you try, sometimes, you find you can get what you need. (Who said that again? Emerson?)

Third, in collaboration by difference, you start with people who do not share assumptions, who do not share backgrounds, who do not share institutions, who do not share ideas, and who may not even share the same goals. And you see what happens. No game plan. We did this when we came up with the idea for the HASTAC Scholars. It's been fascinating to see the range of topics, the level of engagement, who contributes and who does not, who prefers the quick jab, who the long flow. That mix is what makes the Program interesting and vital. I hope the HASTAC Scholars start to use one another as resources . . . you often, for example, can't have a panel with all participants from your own university or just on your own pet topic, but HASTAC Scholars allow for a some great topical opportunities across institutions, with different disciplinary approaches. We'll see what comes of that.

Fourth, back to James Bond. So Sandy and Nathaniel were wondering out loud with Priscilla, Joe, and me about deserts in Bolivia, filmic continuity, who Vesper was and what she did or didn't do in the last Bond film, whether the movie was filmed on backlots or locations and what locations, and what Giancarlo Giannini had been doing since those Wertmuller movies of the 1970s. I went to Wikipedia this morning and spent the next half hour lost, far, far from the Quantum of Solace, clicking from link to link to link out into the information stratosphere. (Peter Lamont designed the sets, which were my favorite part of the movie; I was shocked to read he was born in 1929, sixty years worth of work as a film set designer. My other favorite part of the movie was James Bond's knifeblade-sharp Tom Ford suits and then the American CIA-agent's schlompy cotton shirts and dowdy ties worn on a slouchy posture that must have been fun for the costume designer Lindy Hemming and the actor. I was also interested to find that the plane battle sequences were filmed in thirty-second segments for safety reasons. But I digress . . .)

Here's the point: I rarely go to movies. But when I go, I find I am interested in just about everything, from the sets and the FX and the CGI to the acting methods, the production, the location, the politics, the colors, the costumes, the design. As with most of us, I have many areas of interest that, analogous to weak ties, might be called "weak interests," matters of curiosity but not expertise. The form of collaboration by difference that is Wikipedia is particularly satisfying because people who have expertise are the ones mainly responsibile for all of those entries that cater to my "weak interests." That is the brilliance of the volunteerism or what we call the participatory learning aspect of collaboration by difference. That is, if I am passionate about something, if I am an expert in it, I want to share that expertise and there are only so many dinner parties one can ruin (ah, this is getting personal) by talking about dopamine latency and new models of associative learning. (It's a conversation stopper, believe me.) But on Wikipedia, one can write to one's heart's content as long as you meet the community rules of Wikipedia. Anyone can then read your entry and they can choose when to stop reading about your obsession. They are not bound by the temporalities of the dinner table. They can dip in or dip out, they can follow links into the stratosphere.

This form of contribution and participation is not simply the "wisdom of crowds." It is the contribution of one's singular expertise to a community that can challenge, emend, review, or augment that expertise. You do not have to be bound by the "workability" factor that governs so much collaboration by research teams or by administrative taskforces--or the polite dinner party guest. Because others who are going to profit by the entry have the volition to enter and to exit, your contribution can be proportionate to your interests not theirs. You do not need to calibrate your contribution to a presumed, rather homogenized or statistically median interest of an implied audience the way you would for an article or book manuscript.

That is a key aspect of collaboration by difference. I may find something I never expected to find out because my expectations of an outcome are not governing your participation toward that outcome.

That is a new model of collaboration. In a subsequent posting, I will discuss the ways that online affordances promote this particular variation on the collaborative method in ways that other kinds of affordances, adjacencies, and intersections do not. We are just beginning, I believe, to parse the newness of new media and, to my mind, the most interesting aspects are the human, social, organizational possibilities that most of us are only now beginning to fathom together. Between a globally interconnected financial crisis of epic proportions and the success of the Internet-enabled-community-organizer-Chicago-Aldermanic-Web 2.0 model of the Obama presidental campaign, we are getting a crash course these days in how collaboration by difference works.

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Special thanks to Flickr community member Gin Girl Jen for this delightful collaborative image. I like the image (all her images are great---click on this one for full documentation and her photostream) and I like the concept, I jump, you jump, we all jump.