Themes The Rise of Collaboration

The collective action of beehives, photographed by Ted Horowitz.

Yochai Benkler dubs it 'the wealth of networks." Howard Rheingold's term is "smart mobs." It's the idea of technology-enabled collaboration … and it's making us all smarter.

The open-source movement embodies this spirit of collaboration. Jimmy Wales tells the story of perhaps the movement's most famous example, Wikipedia -- while Richard Baraniuk envisions a free global education system to which thousands of teachers could contribute. Charles Leadbeater gives examples of collaborative innovation that predate the Web. And 2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair wants to shelter the world -- by providing an online platform for open-source architecture.

And Deborah Gordon shows us the inspiration for all this: the desert anthill.

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