A sign of the growing popularity of all kinds of collaboration is the growing number of books on some aspect of the topic.  What are your favorites? Here are some I’ve come across:

Alone Together: Sociable Robots, Digitized Friends, and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude by Sherry Turkle.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop.

Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond.

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results by Morten T. Hansen.

Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Model by Robert Axelrod.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler.

Consensus Through Conversation: How to Achieve High-Commitment Decisions by Larry Dressler.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.

Creating a Culture of Collaboration: The International Association of Facilitators Handbook by Sandy Schuman.

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball.

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.

The Culture of Collaboration by Evan Rosen.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson.

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges by Andrew McAfee.

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni.

The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations by Robert L. Cross.

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide by Cass R. Sunstein.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li.

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration by Keith Sawyer.

Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature by Mark Earls.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky.

Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization by J. Lipman-Blumen and J. & H. Leavitt.

How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions by David Strauss and Thomas C. Layton.

How to Make Meetings Work by Michael Doyle and David Strauss.

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moises Naim.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein.

Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances by J. Richard Hackman.

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World by Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling.

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others by Marco Iacoboni.

Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia and Frances Anderson.

The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion by Rich Ling.

The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule by Donald W. Pfaff and Edward O. Wilson.

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks by Mark Buchanan.

Organizing Genius – The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren Bennis.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators by Patrick Lencioni.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison.

The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player: Becoming the Kind of Person Every Team Wants by John C. Maxwell.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold.

Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin.

Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future by Margaret J Wheatley.

Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves by Adam L. Penenberg.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler.

Why Teams Don’t Work by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith.

X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman.

You’re strolling down a boutique-lined street. A restaurant catches your eye. You whip out your phone, scan the bar code on the window then go online to peak at reviews. It got raves so why not go in? After all, you’ll get a ring on your phone if your parking meter runs low whilst you’re dining. Then you can pay for more time – by phone. These are just two of the mobile phone location-based scenarios that have launched here in San Francisco. More to come.

We’ve come a long way since Howard Rheingold first wrote about Smart Mobs. The U.S. still lags behind some countries in the proliferation of uses for cell phones. Soon we’ll see a flood of location-based services (and ads?!) for those out shopping or exploring, according to Geographical Sciences professor, Paul Torrens, who is studying crowd behavior.

“Crowds of shoppers, endowed with smart chip credit cards and RFID tagged merchandise are trailed by long-lasting data shadows that follow them ubiquitously. Embedded in urban infrastructure and in the very products we consume, new technologies are emerging to enable cities to think about—and process—the people that pulse through them, with a burgeoning code-space being developed to capture the actions and interactions of individuals within large dynamic crowds.”

Recall soccer fans’ post-match riots? Notice the apparent increase of teen and tweens’ cyber bullying and other tragically belittling behavior via computer, texting and Twittering? Now staging flash mobs from a distance and anonymously, using technology, can create havoc and/or change opinions almost as quickly as inciting a riot at a stadium.

And one can attract larger crowds. People don’t even have to know each other to gather. They can literally take their rage and revenge to the streets faster, armed with the right location-based technology. They can swarm to surround a victim with less forethought and more speed.

In short the stakes are higher, for good and bad location-based crowd behavior now. The flip side of this sometimes lethal, tech-supported action is the ability to swarm to a location to play, protest or even surround people who in danger – a human ring of protection. For buying products, collaborating, sharing opinions – and so much more – the trend toward technology-supported, location-based services will probably touch your mobile life.

That’s why I wanted to interview the far-sighted, thoughtful Howard Rheingold.

Bluntly speaking, we are more likely to cooperate in a group when those who don’t get punished. “Darwin had a blind spot. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the role of cooperation in evolution. He just didn’t see how important it is.” Little has changed until relatively recently.

We were raised to compete because we were taught it was a matter of survival of the fittest. Yet, as David Brooks noted, even today, some believe in upfront combat and some in consensus.

Speaking of working together (or not), in many situations experts are not as accurate as a large group can be. “In fact, large groups, structured properly, can be smarter than the smartest member of a group.”

Want more insights on when and how we will act to accomplish something better together than apart? Explore The Cooperation Commons, a project co-sponsored by The Institute for the Future and today’s interviewee, the ever colorful, Howard Rheingold.

Last February this somewhat unconventional Stanford professor won a MacArthur Foundation grant to create a social media virtual classroom, “to show use how and why to use social media. What’s worked and what hasn’t, so far, in this experiment – and how can we learn from his experience, to hone our use of social media? Unlike many other academics, as Rheingold has written, “Talking about public opinion making is a richer experience if you’ve tried to do it.”

A veteran commentator on participatory and social media, he covers Second Life, flash mobs and group swarming that inspired Improv Everywhere, our instinctive desire to participate in a compatible group, ways the faces of political candidates influence voting, civic participation and the proliferation of uses for cell phones to riot, buy, protest, protect and play together.

Following up on how cell phone use is changing us, read the new book, by sociologist Rich Ling: New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion.

A big stumbling block in hiring the graphic designer who most “gets” your business is this. You won’t know if you’ll like the design until after you put your money down. The smaller your business and budget the greater the risk it seems.

That’s how it works at two popular places, ifreelance and Elance. Buyer post requests for designs. Designers submit proposals. Buyer hires a designer, then waits to see the results.

This month, crowdSPRING, an online business launched to level that risk. It provides protections for creatives and for buyers.

Here’s how it works. Would-be buyers post a description of their project, the budget and their deadline. Then, according to co-founder, Ross Kimbarovsky, “Creatives from around the world submit actual designs – not merely RFPs. Buyers pick from actual designs.” To demonstrate how it works crowdSPRING posted a $5,000 contract the design of their home page. (I spoke at HOW Design, a conference where attendees could give great feedback on this approach.)

crowdSPRING provides for buyers and sellers such protections as project management, legal contracts, reputation management, online portfolio placement, and intermediary customer service. Adds Kimbarovsky, “We believe that once a buyer purchases creative services using crowdSPRING’s new model – they’ll never go back to the traditional model.” Note, they already have 1,503 members and visitors from 122 different countries/territories. For variations of this approach see GeniusRocket and Criggle.

Kimbarovsky and his colleague Pete Burgeson, said they took this approach after reading about crowdsourcing and communities in Howard Rheingold’s book, Smart Mobs. Crowdsourcing, a term actually coined by Jeff Howe, means, “taking tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce.”

Thanks for the tip Michelle Wolverton. Kimbarovsky and the other co-founder, Mike Samson, “wanted to achieve just three things with crowdSPRING: give creatives a level playing field, offer buyers choice, and protect intellectual property for all.” See what you think.

So says Smart Mobs author Howard Rheingold in this 19-minute talk at the Ted conference. He believes it is instinctive to want to participate in a compatible group. Of course, we are only as strong as the weakest link. Hear how to be a part of collective action and participatory media. It may lead you to hearing more and reading this chapter of Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth.

…looks like you, research shows. So if you are leaning toward one political (or marital?) candidate or have not yet decided, here’s how you might be influenced. “Morphing faces”- based research demonstrates your instinctive tendency to like the person who looks right – like you.

Smart Mobs author and Stanford professor, Howard Rheingold has been tracking the research for several years as it has appeared in peer-researched journals. According to Rheingold, “The finding is simple — using the same morphing software you can buy online for twenty or thirty dollars, researchers morphed subjects’ faces into the photographs of political candidates. Without knowing that their own faces had been incorporated, potential voters who either weakly favored one candidate or had not yet made a decision decided to choose the candidate that subliminally resembled themselves — even though they were not told about the morphing until after they made their choices. Candidates can be made to look more caucasian, asian, etc. — depending, I presume, on the precinct:

…a Bailenson experiment done before the 2004 election in collaboration with Shanto Lyengar, director of Stanford’s Political Communication Lab, partially morphed the photos of undecided voters with those of either George Bush or John Kerry. Voters preferred the candidate they’d been morphed into—but could not consciously detect that the photo contained their own face.”

While it is not surprising to learn that we tend to like the people who look most familiar to us, this finding has huge implications in the presidential campaign. Not only do we have a black and a woman candidate but there’s an extreme variation in the facial types of all candidates. In this Stanford magazine article, see “Electable Like Me” under the section “One last Experiment.”

Back to how this finding affects us in everyday life, here are two additional insights:

Peter Kaminski suggests this additional possibility: “I’ll bet familial similarity is similarly strong as similarity to the subject her/himself, and that familial similarity would be stronger than ethnic similarity. So I wonder how useful morphing per precinct/ethnicity would be. It would be interesting to see results from familial morphs — sibling/same gender, sibling/opposite gender, mother, father, etc. And partner/spouse.”

Alex Halvais predicts that, “Faces that approach an eigenface are more likely to be judged attractive. The face that contains all faces is probably the most electable face of all.”