David (behind camera) working with Phd colleagues at the Smart Lab in cooperative, sharing exercises.
You meet a guy/girl you have never met.
They do something remarkable that you don't do and perhaps therefore you would wish to be in possession of this.Conversely, and you're not to know, they may be thinking the same thing about you.
You exchange some tentative words, find you overlap on their space and again conversely they're asking you questions.
Now here's the dilemma.
In that time you probably get a good idea of what they do and you could if you perservered incorporate that into your own way of working.
They might be thinking the same, though again you don't know.
But then something extraordinary happens in this extraordinary climate.
Share Culture
It began many years back; when sapirn sussed that in a bid to stay alive it would be more beneficial if they hunted together which would yield greater rewards.
They cooperated.
But the word found favour and pop stardom in the era of the Open Source - the Net.
Share, Share, Share.
It somehow goes against the grain of things we've come to believe - and often I find its strongest opponents, strangely but naturally, in the alliances of new journalists.
At school you most likely curled your hand around your work to avoid it being seen by others or engaged in subterfuge to get the highest marks above your colleagues - and perhaps, perhaps there was good reason for that.
John slept all day while Jane swotted to pass exams and she'll be damned if she was going to do John that Lazy ********d any favours.
But then we enter a new phase of out lives: dependency from birth gives way to independence ( quick hide your work) then from there hopefully interdependence.
The matra: what you do adds to what we do sits at the front of the cortex.
That's how Robb Montgomery and I in the space of a few minutes of meeting each other in Cairo decided without consultation, without any fuss, how we would mutually we would work together.
It's a bond of trust of understanding which is difficult to determine, to even predict.
And many, many, many of us are doing - much still to the bewilderment of business.
Somewhere in the time continuum of high school to university or life in teens to twenties it may reveal itself.
But how do you engineer it?
How do you effect change
There are cultures and personalities I have come across over the years in my lecturing that eschew partnering.
There are a number of reasons why, often very legitimate in the way we must also respect others customs.
....this profession however, this new dawn of a profession however begs cooperation.
It requires, graphic artist speak to coders, journalists speak to Flash designers, speak to photojos, speak to managers, speak to employers - NOT as a top down.
An ideal state and perhaps a naive one you might say, but there is much value, huge value in this.
And within the ecosystem of cooperation people find each other.
"I will find you" barked Daniel Day lewis in The Last Mohican.
Smartest Person
I'm forever using the phrase borrowed from Dan Gilmor of the smartest person in the room syndrome amongst those I'm sharing ideas with.
Sometimes I'll be asked a question and jokingly refuse to answer because I sense the person posing the question hasn't turned other side of themselves to ask someone else.
That somone who've they've been sharing space with for a considerable time may just know the answer.
70-80% of what you think you know ( the percentage is not definitive) is apparent when you end up teaching someone else.
There are twin rewards.
Confirmation of your own knowledge and more so adding to this unconventional transaction of helping someone else.
Before the film "pass it on" that's what we knew it by.
The road less travelled
Many years ago I got lost in Brindisi, Italy with a friend travelling through Europe.
A young girl, barely able to speak English; our only italian was thank you, took us to her home - shooing us to be quiet as we walked upstair.
Her dad, she showed pictures of was a boxer and we could hear him yelling in the background.
Next day as we set off, creeping downstairs, we offered whar money we had left.
She declined and she didn't have to say what she expected of us.
Dilemma
In essence that's where we are with Prisoners Dilemma; if you don't know it already as part of game theory it's worth investigating.
And that for me is one of the challenges to new journalism, not the technology which we'll have to wrap our heads around but the unwritten quid pro quo.
Meeting new people like Robb and getting excited very quickly at what he does; of talking to students who when you put something in the bank return it with interest.
It is the story of IMB and the open Sources who declined any money; and in my case Al Jazeera's creative director Morgan Almeida who took my site Viewmgazine.tv to make their own site and in which I went back to their site to see how I might modify my own.
The difference in approach resides in the value of new thinking; how working together - as new age hunters gets us to the fastest prey, gets us to new planes, gets us away from how our Gimme gimme gimme ways will end up undermining us.
It is being played on the world stage with climate control.
The biggest game of Prisoners Dilemma manifesting itself because some nations have no respect for others and so would probably want to go down togther than find common ground.
But I digress.
There's good reason I hope that as the Net digs deeper into the unit of our work-life's currency; when Net Neutrality reigns, that journalism - the exchange, interpretation of data and information creates something even more powerful and wonderous than we're seeing today.
That is from those already paving the way for change and they quietly know who they are.
GRAZIE
