Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation and collective action of both beneficial and destructive kinds.
Kollock provides a literature review and taxonomy of social dilemma models and social dilemma solutions, as well as current issues and future directions of studying social dilemmas.
Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, explores and develops the theory of the late Clare Graves - a "bio- psycho- social-" understanding of how human's collectively respond to their living conditions and how these responses prompt the emergence of latent value systems / thinking capacities.
Insect studies on emergent intelligence in swarms of unintelligent actors has practical relevance to distributed computing, robotics, and other applications; for example, foraging insects use pheromone trails to select the shortest paths to food, a strategy that has been used to solve the famous "traveling salesman problem" in computer science.
Eric Raymond compares two styles of software development using his own experience as illustration -- the traditional top-down (Cathedral) approach and the bottom-up (Bazaar) approach -- and points out how Internet-enabled cooperation makes the Bazaar approach highly efficient for the right tasks.
Dan Bricklin examines ways to induce a pool of users to contribute to a commons without extra effort, using the architecture of the commons (as in Napster's default to sharing in the way download directories are available) and leveraging user's self-interest.
