Collaboration Without Coordination

In this Clay Shirky talk at TED Global, he describes how democratic principles of freedom of expression and engaged citizenship can be enabled online by the use of “distributed version control”, or software that allows “collaboration without coordination.” This is a funny and thought provoking talk, urging people to seek, as he puts it, not only a dashboard from their governments, but also a steering wheel.

The main barrier to this development is expressed concisely in this image: