Rheingold: Technologies of Cooperation

Just as the digital computer can be any machine you can program it to be and the Internet turns every desktop into a printing press, broadcasting station, community or market, the mobile Internet's unique capability is the power it gives people and machines to organize collective action.
Together with my colleagues Andrea Saveri and Kathi Vian, I've put together a report (PDF) and visual map of technologies of cooperation for publication by our sponsor, the Institute for the Future. Taken together with Mobile and Open: A Manifesto, this report and accompanying graphic map are offered as resources to the developers, designers, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, operators, service providers and activists who seek to use these new tools to alleviate suffering, create wealth, educate, liberate, create and inform.
Although we report about technologies, the power of these tools derives from the social practices they amplify -- specifically the ways people, machines and institutions can cooperate. These emerging digital technologies present new opportunities to change the way people work together to solve problems and generate wealth. Central to this class of cooperation-amplifying technologies are eight key clusters, each with distinctive contributions to scientific, economic, social and political forms of collective action: