I will add "coordinating" to these other two distinctions I often make.

* coordinating -- avoiding interference with independent goals
* cooperating -- aligning goals, perhaps through promises or contracts
* collaborating -- advancing other's goals, selflessly or based on trust

I've noticed that wiki editors can sense the motives of other authors and are often right. I suspect these distinctions are harder to extract from logs by mechanical means. The counts and graphs are still interesting.

Best regards. -- Ward



On Jul 23, 2012, at 11:11 AM, FT2 wrote:

Walking down the street suggests different objectives and a sole criterion of "other people not impacting my agenda".
 
What about when the common activity is a genuinely common agenda on the same object or structure, such as painting a room, and participants' actions include seeing who's doing what, adjusting your contribution or current activity to try and make it easy for them, when you see them doing things and pass them tools or deal with the matters it's clear they see as problems, in order that their area of focus is progressed and faciliated, and when you can see the pattern they are painting in one area and you stop yours to help theirs, identify what they're aiming for by their painting to date, and you pick up another pot of paint to give them a hand in the places it's clear their intention is to complete, and when you deliberately take time to build on or enhance their initial outline by painting extra decorations within it, and watching to see if they like it or not? 
 
Then, I think, it can't be compared to the narrow activity of "ensure others don't intrude on my intentions and otherwise complete indifference" as occurs when people walk down the street.
 
 
FT2

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Jodi Schneider <jschneider@pobox.com> wrote:
This suggests distinguishing "coordination" and "collaboration". I don't know of firm definitions of these.
 
Walking down the street avoiding bumping into others -- that is definitely "coordination". Whether it's "collaboration" is (to me) less clear.
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