Conversation

There’s a vast gap of meaningful, rewarding, and lightweight creative collaboration models between (say) bantering games on twitter and co-authoring a book or co-building a product. The transaction costs in setting up even modest little collaboration are too high. Wonder why.
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Paul Erdos is a good example of doing this well. What with his system of modest bounties on math problems and showing up at friends homes with a suitcase ready to collaborate saying “my brain is open”. His case illuminates some sufficient conditions...
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1. He was a genius whose contribution elevated the value of “small” 2. Math is peculiarly well-suited to breaking down work into small chunks 3. Capital input for math is coffee 4. He was single and mobile 5. He inhabited discipline where most peers had institutional homes
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These conditions are incredibly hard to replicate even in the next-cheapest kind of collaboration space, like say between writers and illustrators.
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Moving from academia to industry, frequency of “let’s collaborate!” overtures dropped to 1/3. Moving from industry to free agency, another 1/3, so now at 1/9. Oddly enough the *yield* rate of successful collaborations has gone *up* slightly.
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In academia (postdoc level) I had 1 tiny collaboration outside of students and advisors — a friend wrote a bit of code to solve a sub-problem. Not publication-worthy though. At Xerox, I had 2 side collaborations outside of budgeted work in my own teams. Both led to patents.
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In 7 years of free agency, outside of work I’ve paid for or been paid for, and not counting contributions to ribbonfarm where I only played editor, it feels like I’ve done a lot of collaborations with output, but both the creative relationship and output have been illegible.
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Replying to
- the Ribbonfarm community - all of us who have written consider you a collaborator. No way we would have written as much, as well, without the right audience and you as an editor
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