"That is one of the potential shifts in social reading: Can I create value for other people by saying that I found this passage by Bruno LaTour striking — even if I never look at it again? That’s an amazing act of what I called “frozen sharing” in my last book. Being generous about things when you are offering it out to the public, without it being either in a specific time frame or for a specific target."

"In this paper we define what we call an affinity system, which is a set of individuals, each with a vector characterizing its preference for all other individuals in the set. The preference of a member can be given either by a ranking of all members or by a weighted vector that defines the degrees of its affinity to others. Affinity systems are useful for modeling social systems as well as general data sets, as social interactions are often determined by affinities among the members. We also define a natural notion of (potentially overlapping) communities in an affinity system, in which the members of a given community collectively prefer each other to anyone else outside the community. Thus these communities are "self-determined" or "self-certified" by the affinity system. We provide a tight polynomial bound on the number of self-determined communities as a function of the robustness of the community. Moreover, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for enumerating these communities, as well as a local algorithm with a strong stochastic performance guarantee that can find a community in time nearly linear in the of size the community.…"

"In a recent paper, we analyzed the self-assembly of a complex cooperation network. The network was shown to approach a state, where every agent invests the same amount of resources. Nevertheless, highly-connected agents arise that extract extra-ordinarily high payoffs while contributing comparably little to any of their cooperations. Here, we investigate a variant of the model, in which highly-connected agents have access to additional resources. We study analytically and numerically whether these resources are invested in existing collaborations, leading to a fairer load distribution, or in establishing new collaborations, leading to an even less fair distribution of loads and payoffs."

"To counter this trend, and to encourage collaboration in the workplace, we built an internal tool called Lunch Roulette that selects random pairs of Fellows to join each other on impromptu lunch dates.…"

"Many definitions define what social capital is and what it does. In fact, there seems to be broader agreement in the literature about what social capital does, than what it is! In particular, it is widely agreed that social capital facilitates mutually beneficial collective action."

"This leads me to something else that I always find hard to articulate: the ROI of IndyHall, or even coworking in general.

We’ve been running IndyHall for nearly 3 years as a business for a reason, and a profitable one at that. But the metrics for ROI aren’t salient, since most of the investment has been in human, knowledge, and time capital, and the return doesn’t show up on our balance sheet. As such, Geoff and I don’t take a draw, at least not in terms of cash…because that’s not what’s we’ve invested. If there was a balance sheet for the social capital we’ve invested and seen in return, though, and we had metrics for it, we’d be able to far better express and share what we’ve accomplished."

"You might think that with the economy crashing, the free-labor business model would be crashing, too. Will people continue to invest in their personal brands during hard times? Gould is betting they will. Between investor visits during a late November trip to New York, he sips a soy latte and speculates. During the downturn, he says, firings are sapping loyalty to companies and steering people toward goals of self-sufficiency. In Gould's acerbic phrasing: "The only person I can rely on not to screw me—hopefully—is myself."

Beyond brand-hungry strivers, masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one. Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and finding satisfaction in helping others."

"The result is a kind of frat house for modern-day mad scientists. Outside the collective’s home is the bustling Fulton Street Mall, where vendors hawk sneakers and bundles of incense. Inside the converted laboratory, circuit boards, gadgets and spare parts overflow from every shelf. A minifridge near the entrance is stocked with beer. Members eager to quench their thirst can also consult Bar Bot, a silvery drink-dispensing robot that resembles the Jetsons’ maid, Rosie."

"What better reason, then, to sit back and savor the simple enjoyment of a get-together with friends at a hangout like the Chip-in, which Miller thinks is just a formal venue for the kind of casual gatherings that occur all over town."

"Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird."

"Taking someone’s money is expensive. It incurs transaction and bookkeeping costs and it incurs emotional and social costs. Micropayments have historically focused on eliminating the cash overheads while ignoring the intangible costs. For a writer whose career might span decades and involve hundreds of thousands of readers, these costs cannot be ignored."

"Tell people what you need: OK, this one seems like it should be pretty obvious, but I'm starting here because this is where far too many people miss the boat. Whether it's for fear of imposing or being told no, or a feeling that they should be able to "do it themselves," the biggest mistake people make when it comes to helping people help them is not asking."

"My opinion, and its a strong one, is to encourage entrepreneurs to band together and help each other. Lets face it, great minds think alike. When you get a bunch of great minds together in one place, it can be like watching the best fireworks you’ve ever seen. Be warned though, ALWAYS know your scope and what your needs are. Only give what you get and make sure there is a value to everything that you do."

"I maintain that small world ethics will trump big world ethics everytime."

"The main advantage of an un-conference is that it helps build social capital among participants. In addition to the participatory sessions and collaborative / anarchic scheduling, there were places for people to do things together."