Collaborative Futures: A Book About the Future of Collaboration, Written Collaboratively

by Mushon Zer-Aviv, Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg

The true nature of collaborative culture as a form of creative expression in the context of digital and network technologies has remained elusive, a buzzword often falling prey to corporate and ideological interests. This book was collaboratively written by six authors, as an experimental five day Book Sprint in January 2010. Developed under the aegis of transmediale.10, this third publication in the festival's parcours series resulted in the initiation of a new vocabulary on the forms, media and goals of collaborative practice. In June 2010, the book was rewritten as a part of the exhibition at Eyebeam, NY. This second edition invited three new authors to challenge the free culture sentiment underlying the original writing. The result is a deliberately multi-voiced tone pondering the merits and shortcomings of this new emerging ideology.

188 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2010

Reviews

[Harsh Gupta · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an unusual book, mainly because of mode of production. Seven people wrote this is in a book sprint. While this book provided good "insights" into the history and future of collaborations it mainly served as a collection of prompts to think about. This book referred to a great deal of supplementary resource I have to go back, note them down and add all of them to my reading list.

Update
You can download the book for free from http://collaborative-futures.org/
This books is licensed under Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike license. You can tinker with the content add your own chapters and distribute it among your friends as long as you attribute the original creators and release the modified work in the same license as original. You probably won't tinker with it, but its good to know that you can.

[Rowan Livengood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was an interesting read, and if you're present on the internet past when it originally came out, I believe it might be redundant. The prospect of creating a book to serve as a public account, an ever-evolving edition of the public's belief of collaboration, was a triumph at the time and still seems like quite the accomplishment. The chapters will be so self-aware and aware of the finished product, more than you are, so it can make the reading process and bit strenuous. Good ideas are rampant and are more of a collection of other materials focusing around the central theme the book brings to light. That of Collaborative Futures.

As a creative myself, I fell in love with the idea to sit down with a bunch of my friends and try and shove out a book from our collective consciousness. If anyone wants to do something like this, hit me up. The aspect of nonfiction helps this book jump around as it does; creating a collective work on fiction could see to be difficult but equally as intriguing, if not more so.

This book can be found free online and to be further collaborated on on flossmanuals.net.

p.s. I know this review is hard to read. It was a collaboration between me, myself, and I.