Impact of Open Collaboration on Collective and Individual Wealth
* Projected PhD - Impact of open collaboration and group regulation on collective and individual wealth. By Fabio Balli. Montreal Concordia University, 2016
URL = http://www.fabioballi.net/en/phd
Description
"In the last decades, groups (cultural creatives) and organizations (open value networks, benefit corporations) have cleared the path for a new way of living together, where the quality of cooperation prevails over individual performance.
In order to build on collective intelligence and preserve the common good – land, water, seeds, human genome, cultural artifacts, social assets –, both group regulation and open collaboration matter.
Open collaboration ensures that the work achieved by a group can be used and improved by everyone. It is a way to invite individuals to contribute to a common project. It enables large groups to build on their complementarities to create value for the community.
Group regulation (encounter groups) enables every individual to achieve autonomy. It provides a space to explore authentic relating by inviting each participant to learn about himself though constructive feedback, social contracts and aggregation-based decisions.
Thus, my intention is to do doctoral research on
How do open collaboration and group regulation affect the flow and autonomy of individuals, and the integrity and societal impact of organizations ?
For this participatory action research, I intend to do a comparative analysis of ten initiatives to gather qualitative data on how collaboration and group regulation evolved, and their impact.
In a second part, I intend to facilitate a workshop with a group of students from different disciplines.
Specifics of this activity will be an absence of predefined content, so that people are invited to emerge as a group, and find a common purpose. This should enable everyone to both apply and develop their talents and have a major positive impact (self-organizing models, open systems theory).
This learning experience will be backed by a personal growth process. It will be supported by two tools: one which enables exposure and acknowledgement of all contributions, the other that fosters consensual decision making. Guidelines will also be proposed to foster a sense of belonging and intimacy.
Individual perceptions will be gathered through weekly surveys and interviews to reveal the impact of collaboration and group regulation from the beginning of the experience to its end.
These two parts will enable me to combine a posteriori learnings with observations of an in-vivo process. I also will write a reflective paper to expose how the research transformed me.
In other words, I want to gather best practices and create a replicable activity to sketch answers to: How do we create organizational cultures that foster collective and individual wisdom ? How do we embody change to take on complex challenges together?
This research project is done at Montreal Concordia University, as an individualized program.
It is supervised by Marguerite Mendell (social economy), Satoshi Ikeda (political sociology), Philippe Caignon (experiential learning) and Warren Linds (participatory research), with the contribution of two leading experts : Madeleine Laugeri (group regulation) and Tiberius Brastaviceanu (open collaboration)."