Main Page/Industrial Cooperation Project

The Cooperation Project

Despite the growing popular and academic recognition of the importance of commons-based, cooperative, and peer production, there is still relatively little sustained academic work that studies both the scope and micro-foundations of these phenomena. Together, the rise of commons-based collaboration and production encompasses a class of innovative and creative practices whose outputs could be freely available to support human development in a global, networked information economy and society.

The purpose of the Cooperation Project was to allow the Berkman Center for Internet and Society to develop a more comprehensive map of current practices, and a basic set of methodological tools and approaches, to allow the continued study of commons-based practices, both online and offline, as well as large-scale networked cooperation. To this end, the proposal envisioned two tracks within a single study.

One track would focus on defining verticals within existing industries, and would map those industries in terms of the degree to which open and commons-based practices were used as compared to proprietary approaches. This mapping would also analyze who was using such commons-based strategies, and provide initial pointers for future political alliances on issues of patent and copyright policy. We now call this track the Industrial Cooperation Project (ICP), which is the focus of this ICP Wiki. The second track would focus on developing new approaches to studying online cooperation on a much larger and more comprehensive scale than attempted in the past. We call this track the Online Cooperation Research group.

We hired two Fellows to direct the two parts of the project. Carolina Rossini was the project manager of the ICP, from 2008 to 2010. Aaron Shaw was the project manager for the OCR, from 2008 to 2009. Each has worked to develop a methodological framework, cooperative research infrastructure, and to hire and train researchers to assist with the research.

The ICP

The methodological approach of the ICP is well known and understood: the industry case study. The primary challenge here was to create a conceptual map that would allow us to: (a) standardize observations across sectors; (b) represent conceptually and visually the relevant attributes of players in each sector, and their changes over time, if any; and (c) identify whether industry practices have shifted toward more or less cooperative frameworks over time.

To achieve this Carolina developed a quadrant mapping approach. For the first year, we have focused on four major sectors that will likely have significant impact on global development and welfare over the long term: Biotechnology - Genomic and Proteomics; Alternative Energy; Educational materials; and Telecommunications.

The Biotechnology - Genomic and Proteomics sector has enormous potential implications for global health and food security; has well developed variability in practices, with some of the most proprietary alongside some of the most open and collaborative efforts. It therefore is a substantively important area and a potential model for our analysis more broadly.

The second sector is one of enormous importance, but one for which there has been practically no work done on innovation policy to foster cooperation and knowledge sharing — Alternative Energy. Here, the practices are less well developed, there is no real structure for commons-based practices, but there is substantial and interesting support from the current United States Department of Energy to embrace innovation-sharing practices as part of the global effort to address climate change and sustainability. In this regard, the area is important, and particularly fertile for developing new political alliances around questions of innovation and development as checks on IP.

The third sector is central to education—that is, Educational Materials. This area is intermediate in the development of commons-based practices, counting large and historically powerful incumbents supported by regulation and practices such as the textbook adoption process within K-12. However, the impact of technology and emergence of new business models, the maturity of open educational resources projects, and, primarily the recognition of those by the Obama administration as central to improve educational opportunities to all Americans, among other forces, may shape the future of this field.

The fourth sector, which we studied through an arrangement with an independent expert, was Telecommunications, and in particular innovation in telecommunications. Here, much of the work that is open is done in standards setting, and the debates over telecommunications regulation take on some of the same characteristics as the debates over patents and copyrights in the other areas.

For the second year of the ICP, Carolina has expanded and deepened these initial studies, and extend the research to other sectors such as Diagnostic Kits