Collaboration: Helping Others to Help Yourself

"When you help others, You can't help helping yourself!"  -The Money Song from Broadway's Avenue Q

Howard Rheingold, in his lecture on Collaboration and Crowdsourcing, noted that the concept of human cooperation has been around since the beginning of our species.  Our ancestors quickly learned that they could hunt larger animals, gather more nuts and berries and in turn sustain themselves longer, with the help of others.  It makes sense from an economic perspective  that if you can make yourself better off by trading goods, resources and services with others, then you should do so.  I believe that while many of us consider ourselves to be generous in nature and completely unselfish when it comes to helping others, we all are reaping some kind of personal benefit or self gratification from the process of collaboration.  Whether we are trying to get someone to like us, trying to earn money, or just trying to make ourselves feel good for doing something for a friend or neighbor, we are all gaining some sort of "reward" for our behavior.  I don't consider this a bad thing, in fact I consider it a part of our human nature and we should embrace it. 

Rheingold goes on to mention that the advent of new technologies, "enables new forms of collective action" and that "cooperative arrangements have moved from a peripheral role to a more a central role in (our) biology," as well as within a society.  Throughout our history technological advancements have allowed for greater numbers of people to expand their knowledge and intelligence by being exposed to new information that would otherwise have been unavailable to them.  The Internet has proved to be no different in this respect.

Jeff Howe, in his article from Wired Magazine, The Rise of Crowdsourcing, notes that Eli Lily's open initiative crowdsourcing site InnoCentive has successfully used the collaborative efforts of thousands of Internet users to help develop drugs and quickly get them into the consumer market.  This a perfect example of what Rheingold called "enriching others and enriching themselves...a certain kind of sharing is in our self interest."  Those who help to solve problems on InnoCentive's site are compensated for their work.  At the same time, Lily profits from the invention of new medicines that were made possible, at least in part, by the knowledge of InnoCentive's users.  And the public benefits from the release of new drugs that can combat a wide variety of ailments.  Howe quoted Karim Lakhani from MIT saying that, " the strength of a network like InnoCentive is exactly the diversity of intellectual background."  Using this example, it's easy to see that while cooperative actions among many people help the overall population, the individual is still profiting in some way and that is likely a part of the reason for collaborating in the first place.

The Internet has enabled people from all over the world, from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures to work together to help make the world a better place, or at least share some knowledge.  Vannevar Bush stated that "man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge" and I think that the Internet has allowed us to profit in ways we never thought possible. 

As a side note, humans are not the only ones who exhibit this kind of self gratifying collaborative behavior.  In this month's issue of Smithsonian magazine, a blurb about the forked tailed Drongos, a bird found in the Kalahari Desert, explains how they will scan for predators and make an "all clear call so other birds can spend more time looking for food."  Nice right? Well it turns out that they also produce "false alarm" calls so they can take advantage of any food that was left by other birds.  Sure they help out when predators are around but they also gain some reward (food) when birds flee the area in fear for their safety.  Interesting.