Defining collaboration isn't so easy, because collaboration can be something so simple, like adding a post or a small edit, or complicated like an enduring partnership.

I may be off point, but I suppose it's what's on my mind right now :-)

Generally social change connotes a progressive mindset. It's very interesting to me to see how in the USA today there is such a polarization along the liberal and conservative axis. What's strange is that when I think of real challenges confronting people today, liberal and conservative don't seem the most important categories in responding to them.

On Facebook I've got a nephew whose very much in thrall of Hannity-FreeRepublic-Fox News conservatism. Recently he posted videos of a PR guy named Bob Basso who does performances as Thomas Paine on TV and YouTube videos. These are wildly popular some of them with 9 million views. Tea Bagging...

I've also been surprised to see people from Onet who I feel I've collaborated with posting similar sorts of expressions on their FB Walls. Oh and with the G20 here looking at the online media of that event and seeing how much references Alex Jones who expresses paleoconservative views.

The Thomas Paine shtick reminded me of an early book by Jeremy Rifkin "Common Sense II" where Rifkin channels Thomas Paine in not such a different way from today's Bob Basso. The biggest difference is Basso is creating a bigger audience: Collaborators?

There is anger across the land, and I see that right-wing politics is talking up revolution. Sadly, if history is any guide, revolutions are a sort of social change that seem mostly to end badly.

While the definition of collaboration is left very open, I think implicit in starting the thread is an idea of online collaboration which crosses multiple boarders.

So back to Basso and channeling Thomas Paine. It reminded me of Rifkin back in the 1970's. His book was in collaboration with some of what Ralph Nader was doing at the time. And more generally connected with ideas about creating "economic democracy." One of Nader's efforts in this was "The People's Bicentennial Commission." The only references I can find to that are right wing organizations and the many anti-activist sites online. The People's Bicentennial Commission is long forgotten, but the people most closely associated with it never stopped working on economic democracy.

Thomas Paine died in New York City in 1810 and apparently there were only six mourners, two of them black. The popularity on the right of agitating revolution I suspect relies on the notion that like Thomas Paine, nobody will remember down the line. Whatever one thinks of Rifkin, after his two early books with revolution in mind, his career has taken a different tack. Few of the people associated with the economic democracy movement contiued to speak in revolutionary terms after the mid-seventies. But their ideas continued to be radical.

One of the founders of The Democracy Collaborative is Gar Alperovitz. Now I tend to identify as a lefty, at least in casual conversation with most Americans. But when I read an associate with the left online, at least in the more historically shaped leftist thoughts, I'm really not there. Alperovitz speaks my language, there's no party line or academic school one has to pledge fealty to.

I had my nephew take the political compass test which asks political opinions and then graphs them on two axes: left-right/libertarian-authoritarian. Not surprisingly he's no right wing authoritarian; he only plays one on Facebook. That's not quite true, he really does identify as right.

Perhaps in American politics today the winner will be the ones who can capture the generalized anger that's out there.

There are a few points I want to make in all of this. The first point has to do with collaboration across politically charged rhetoric. I think there's much more space for collaboration than is often thought.

The second point is during the sixties and seventies there was lots of talk about revolution from the left. Some of it had to do with a particular sort of revolution, but I think much of it is very much like the calls for revolution today coming from the right; it is more about people expressing anger about things gone wrong.

The third point is that since the 1970's many really smart people have been collaborating together to create ideas for positive change. This work has been much more practical and extensive than people imagine and doesn't fit neatly along the left-right continuum.

The forth point is it seems that there is a view that large scale change follows from local actions. Getting local can mean very local, like your home and block, but it can also mean regional issues like watersheds. The boundaries of local are not always political boundaries, but the attention is towards issues which are bounded.

In all the time I've know Christina she's been thousands of miles away. I think it is possible to collaborate across such distances. And I often wax eloquent in a cyber-Utopian sort of way. Nevertheless, I think that the insight about global change following local action is very important. People far away can be of most help with a focused local program. When people collaborate online from all over, the collaboration is best when there is a clear object. A good example is Flickr, people know what the site is about: posting photos.

I think Global Voices is a terrific example of online collaboration. But where it succeeds best is in making local and particular issues known to a broader audience.

Collaboration is best when it is specific, when it's locally oriented or object oriented. I bet that lots more Americans today know who Bab Basso is than know who Gar Alperovitz is. Still, I think it quite significant that so many working for social change in the sixties and seventies dropped the revolution talk and got down to practical work. There's a great well of experience upon which to draw that really isn't so easily poisoned by political propaganda as may be thought.

One of the pitfalls of imagining collaboration is imagining that political agreement is prerequisite for it. In politics divide and rule is the oldest game around. There is an advantage of a a group identity which has an targeted enemy. But the drawback out weigh the advantages. Basic trust building between people is more effective, I believe, than exploiting ideological difference.