A Wikipedia Collaboration: Ballet

At the center of BalletCollective's process is the act of true collaboration. But what does it truly mean to collaborate? As I was searching the web I came across Wikipedia's page for Collaboration; "A collaboration is working with each other to do a task. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus." After making my way through Wikipedia's introduction I came across classical and contemporary examples of collaborations. Classical examples include 'Classical Music', 'Academia', and 'Project Management' to name a few. Then I moved on to the Contemporary examples that I found, including collaborations in 'Arts', 'Music', 'Education', 'Entertainment', 'Publishing', 'Science', 'Medicine' and 'Technology'. 

Contemporary examples[edit]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007)

Arts[edit]

A piece of collaborative art created by students in Currier House at Harvard University

Collaboration—or joint production by two or more artists—is a common style among musicians and performance artists. It has not been so popular, on the other hand, in the world of art, and especially in modern art. But the strong sense of individualism long possessed by artists of fine art began to wane around the 1960s, and some artists working in units have emerged and become widely known along with the development of new media based on the advances in information technology. They have changed the concept of art into something that can be engaged in by more than individual artists alone.

Art groups[edit]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this articleby adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged andremoved. (November 2007)

Fluxus

An international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou wrote, however, Fluxus differed from Dada in its richer set of aspirations, and the positive social and communitarian aspirations of Fluxus far outweighed the anti-art tendency that also marked.

Just Buffalo Literary Center, CEPA Gallery, and Big Orbit are three nonprofit arts organizations in Buffalo, New York, that have shared space and certain administrative functions since 2005. Just Buffalo offers an array of literary arts and arts-in-education programs. CEPA Gallery presents contemporary photo-related art and supports working artists. And Big Orbit has an art gallery and programs in the fields of experimental theater, literary performance, new music and sound art.

Once they co-located their administrative offices they quickly started to realize a number of advantages. Financial savings was an obvious one (they share equipment, a software contract, phone and Internet services and more). Physical proximity also helped the three executives develop a strong sense of trust and respect, and they soon looked for other ways to collaborate, such as hiring a shared grant writer who brings in grants for all three organizations.

There have been many benefits: financial savings because of their shared space, increased donations, and improved artistic programming. Beyond the tangible benefits, there are important intangibles. The agency directors share information and ideas, and they coordinate mailings. Perhaps most important, the organizations have increased their creativity; being in the same space has led to a "think tank" atmosphere. One of the three directors notes that "We work so closely … it's helped us come up with new thinking to expand our capacity and create a built-in brain trust and support system for problem solving and practical help."

Situationist International

The Situationist International (SI) was a small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th century European artistic and political avant-gardes. Formed in 1957, the SI was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. In the 1960s it split into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational and the Second Situationist International. The first SI disbanded in 1972.^[18]

See also Experiments in Art and Technology, Dada and Colab.

Business[edit]

Collaboration in business can be found both inter- and intra-organization^[19] and ranges from the simplicity of a partnership and crowd funding to the complexity of amultinational corporation. Collaboration between public, private and voluntary sectors can be effective in tackling complex policy problems, but may be handled more effectively by committed boundary-spanning teams and networks than by formal organizational structures.^[20] Collaboration between team members allows for better communication within the organization and throughout the supply chains. It is a way of coordinating different ideas from numerous people to generate a wide variety of knowledge. Collaboration with a selected few firms as opposed to collaboration with a large number of different firms has been shown to positively impact firm performance and innovation outcomes.^[21] The recent improvement in technology has provided the world with high speed internet, wireless connection, and web-based collaboration tools like blogs, and wikis, and has as such created a "mass collaboration." People from all over the world are efficiently able to communicate and share ideas through the internet, or even conferences, without any geographical barriers. The power of social networks it beginning to permeate into business culture where many collaborative uses are being found including file sharing and knowledge transfer.

See also : Management cybernetics

A plethora of studies have shown that collaboration can be a powerful tool towards higher achievement and increased productivity since collective efficacy can significantly boost groups’ aspirations, motivational investment, morale, and resilience to challenges.^[22] However, a four-year study of interorganizational collaboration by Fischer and colleagues at the University of Oxford, found that successful collaboration can be rapidly derailed through external policy steering, particularly where it undermines relations built on trust.^[23] [24]

Education[edit]

Generally defined, an Educational Collaborative Partnership is ongoing involvement between schools and business/industry, unions, governments and communityorganizations. Educational Collaborative Partnerships are established by mutual agreement between two or more parties to work together on projects and activities that will enhance the quality of education for students while improving skills critical to success in the workplace.^{[by whom?]}

Collaboration in Education- two or more co-equal individual voluntarily brings their knowledge and experience together by interacting toward a common goal in the best interest of students for the betterment of their education success. Students achieve team building and communication skills meeting many curricular standards. Students have the ability to practice real-world communication experiences. Students gain leadership through collaboration and empowers peer to peer learning.^{[third-party source needed]}

When collaborating in education, according to ISTE NEST-S and NEST-T standards, there is cultural understanding by engaging learners with other cultures and develop technology in enriched learning environments.^{[third-party source needed]}

Societal changes that have taken place over the past few decades allows new ways of conceptualizing collaboration, and to understand the evolution and expansion of these types of relationships. For example, economic changes that have taken place domestically and internationally have resulted in the transformation from an industry-dependent economy to an information-centered economy that is dependent on new technologies and expansion of industries that provide services.^[25] From an educational standpoint, such transformations were projected through federal reports, such as A Nation at Risk in 1983 and What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future in 1996. In these reports, economic success could be assured if students developed the capacity to learn how to “manage teams… and…work together successfully in teams”.^[26]

The continuing development of Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, multiplayer games, online communities, and Twitter, among others, has changed the manner in which students communicate and collaborate.

See also :

• Collaborative Partnerships: Business/Industry-Education
• Learning circle

Music[edit]

Main article: Classical music written in collaboration

Musical collaboration occurs when musicians in different places or groups work on the same album or song. Collaboration between musicians, especially with regards to jazz, is often heralded as the epitome of complex collaborative practice. Special websites as well as software have been created to facilitate musical collaboration over the Internet resulting in the emergence of Online Bands.

Several awards exist specifically for collaboration in music:

• Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals—awarded since 1988
• Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals—awarded since 1995
• Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration—awarded since 2002

Entertainment[edit]

Collaboration in entertainment is a relatively new phenomenon brought on with the advent of social media, reality TV, and video sharing sites such as YouTube andVimeo. Collaboration occurs when writers, directors, actors, producers and other individuals or groups work on the same television show, short film, or feature length film. A revolutionary system has been developed by Will Wright for the production of the TV series title Bar Karma on CurrentTV. Special web-based software, titled Storymaker, has been written to facilitate plot collaboration over the Internet. Organizations such as Orange County Screenwriters Association bring together professional and amateur writers and filmmakers in a collaborative manner for entertainment development.

Publishing[edit]

Collaboration in publishing can be as simple as dual-authorship or as complex as commons-based peer production. Technological examples include Usenet, e-mail lists, blogs and Wikis while 'brick and mortar' examples include monographs (books) and periodicals such as newspapers, journals and magazines.

Science[edit]

Though there is no political institution organizing the sciences on an international level, a self-organized, global network had formed in the late 20th century.^[7]Observed by the rise in co-authorships in published papers, Wagner and Leydesdorff found international collaborations to have doubled from 1990 to 2005.^[7] Whilecollaborative authorships within nations has also risen, this has done so at a slower rate and is not cited as frequently.^[7]

Medicine[edit]

In medicine the physician assistant - physician relationship involves a collaborative plan to be on file with each state board of medicine where the PA works. This plan formally delineates the scope of practice approved by the physician.

Technology[edit]

Due to the complexity of today's business environment, collaboration in technology encompasses a broad range of tools that enable groups of people to work together including social networking, instant messaging, team spaces, web sharing, audio conferencing, video, and telephony. Broadly defined, any technology that facilitates linking of two or more humans to work together can be considered a collaborative tool. Wikipedia, Blogs, even Twitter are collaborative tools. Many large companies are developing enterprise collaboration strategies and standardizing on a collaboration platform to allow their employees, customers and partners to intelligently connect and interact.

Enterprise collaboration tools are centered around attaining collective intelligence and staff collaboration at the organization level, or with partners. These include features such as staff networking, expert recommendations, information sharing, expertise location, peer feedback, and real-time collaboration. At the personal level, this enables employees to enhance social awareness and their profiles and interactions Collaboration encompasses both asynchronous and synchronous methods of communication and serves as an umbrella term for a wide variety of software packages. Perhaps the most commonly associated form of synchronous collaboration is web conferencing using tools such as Cisco TelePresence, Cisco WebEx Meetings, HP Halo Telepresence Solutions, GoToMeeting Web Conferencing, or Microsoft Live Meeting, but the term can easily be applied to IP telephony, instant messaging, and rich video interaction with telepresence, as well. Examples of asynchronous collaboration software include Cisco WebEx Connect, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Sharepoint and MediaWiki.

The effectiveness of a collaborative effort is driven by three critical factors: - Communication - Content Management - Workflow control

The Internet

The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills has made collaborative work dramatically easier. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and test, but the wide reach of the Internet allows such groups to easily form in the first place, even among niche interests. An example of this is the free software movement in software development which produced GNU and Linux from scratch and has taken over development of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org(formerly known as Netscape Communicator and StarOffice).

Commons-based peer production

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Yale's Law professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation. He compares this to firm production (where a centralized decision process decides what has to be done and by whom) andmarket-based production (when tagging different prices to different jobs serves as an attractor to anyone interested in doing the job).

Examples of products created by means of commons-based peer production include Linux, a computer operating system; Slashdot, a news and announcements website; Kuro5hin, a discussion site for technology and culture; Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia; and Clickworkers, a collaborative scientific work. Another example is Socialtext which is a software that uses tools such as wikis and weblogs and helps companies to create a collaborative work environment.

Massively distributed collaboration

The term massively distributed collaboration was coined by Mitchell Kapor, in a presentation at UC Berkeley on 2005-11-09, to describe an emerging activity ofwikis and electronic mailing lists and blogs and other content-creating virtual communities online.

Reading this entry, I'm thinking "where is dance? Where is Ballet?"

Since Wikipedia is a collaboration of its own I thought I'd add my two cents about ballet as a form of collaboration. Below is the new and improved Wikipedia page for collaboration.

Contemporary examples[edit]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007)

Arts[edit]

A piece of collaborative art created by students in Currier House at Harvard University

Collaboration—or joint production by two or more artists—is a common style among musicians and performance artists. It has not been so popular, on the other hand, in the world of art, and especially in modern art. But the strong sense of individualism long possessed by artists of fine art began to wane around the 1960s, and some artists working in units have emerged and become widely known along with the development of new media based on the advances in information technology. They have changed the concept of art into something that can be engaged in by more than individual artists alone.

Art groups[edit]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this articleby adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged andremoved. (November 2007)

Fluxus

An international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou wrote, however, Fluxus differed from Dada in its richer set of aspirations, and the positive social and communitarian aspirations of Fluxus far outweighed the anti-art tendency that also marked.

Just Buffalo Literary Center, CEPA Gallery, and Big Orbit are three nonprofit arts organizations in Buffalo, New York, that have shared space and certain administrative functions since 2005. Just Buffalo offers an array of literary arts and arts-in-education programs. CEPA Gallery presents contemporary photo-related art and supports working artists. And Big Orbit has an art gallery and programs in the fields of experimental theater, literary performance, new music and sound art.

Once they co-located their administrative offices they quickly started to realize a number of advantages. Financial savings was an obvious one (they share equipment, a software contract, phone and Internet services and more). Physical proximity also helped the three executives develop a strong sense of trust and respect, and they soon looked for other ways to collaborate, such as hiring a shared grant writer who brings in grants for all three organizations.

There have been many benefits: financial savings because of their shared space, increased donations, and improved artistic programming. Beyond the tangible benefits, there are important intangibles. The agency directors share information and ideas, and they coordinate mailings. Perhaps most important, the organizations have increased their creativity; being in the same space has led to a "think tank" atmosphere. One of the three directors notes that "We work so closely … it's helped us come up with new thinking to expand our capacity and create a built-in brain trust and support system for problem solving and practical help."

Situationist International

The Situationist International (SI) was a small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th century European artistic and political avant-gardes. Formed in 1957, the SI was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. In the 1960s it split into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational and the Second Situationist International. The first SI disbanded in 1972.^[18]

See also Experiments in Art and Technology, Dada and Colab.

Ballet[edit]

Ballet is, almost always, by nature a collaborative art form. Ballet needs music, it needs dancers, it needs costumes, a venue, lighting, etc. Hypothetically, one person could control all of this. But most often, every work of ballet is the by product of collaboration. From the earliest formal works of ballet, to the great 19th century masterpieces of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa, to the 20th century masterworks of George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky, to today’s ballet companies, such as New York’s BalletCollective, feature strong collaborative connections between choreographers, composers and costume designers are essential. Within dance as an art form, there is also the collaboration between choreographer and dancer. The choreographer creates a movement in her/his head and then physically demonstrates the movement to the dancer, which the dancer sees and attempts to either mimic or interpret - two or more people striving for a connected goal.

Business[edit]

Collaboration in business can be found both inter- and intra-organization^[19] and ranges from the simplicity of a partnership and crowd funding to the complexity of amultinational corporation. Collaboration between public, private and voluntary sectors can be effective in tackling complex policy problems, but may be handled more effectively by committed boundary-spanning teams and networks than by formal organizational structures.^[20] Collaboration between team members allows for better communication within the organization and throughout the supply chains. It is a way of coordinating different ideas from numerous people to generate a wide variety of knowledge. Collaboration with a selected few firms as opposed to collaboration with a large number of different firms has been shown to positively impact firm performance and innovation outcomes.^[21] The recent improvement in technology has provided the world with high speed internet, wireless connection, and web-based collaboration tools like blogs, and wikis, and has as such created a "mass collaboration." People from all over the world are efficiently able to communicate and share ideas through the internet, or even conferences, without any geographical barriers. The power of social networks it beginning to permeate into business culture where many collaborative uses are being found including file sharing and knowledge transfer.

See also : Management cybernetics

A plethora of studies have shown that collaboration can be a powerful tool towards higher achievement and increased productivity since collective efficacy can significantly boost groups’ aspirations, motivational investment, morale, and resilience to challenges.^[22] However, a four-year study of interorganizational collaboration by Fischer and colleagues at the University of Oxford, found that successful collaboration can be rapidly derailed through external policy steering, particularly where it undermines relations built on trust.^[23] [24]

Education[edit]

Generally defined, an Educational Collaborative Partnership is ongoing involvement between schools and business/industry, unions, governments and communityorganizations. Educational Collaborative Partnerships are established by mutual agreement between two or more parties to work together on projects and activities that will enhance the quality of education for students while improving skills critical to success in the workplace.^{[by whom?]}

Collaboration in Education- two or more co-equal individual voluntarily brings their knowledge and experience together by interacting toward a common goal in the best interest of students for the betterment of their education success. Students achieve team building and communication skills meeting many curricular standards. Students have the ability to practice real-world communication experiences. Students gain leadership through collaboration and empowers peer to peer learning.^{[third-party source needed]}

When collaborating in education, according to ISTE NEST-S and NEST-T standards, there is cultural understanding by engaging learners with other cultures and develop technology in enriched learning environments.^{[third-party source needed]}

Societal changes that have taken place over the past few decades allows new ways of conceptualizing collaboration, and to understand the evolution and expansion of these types of relationships. For example, economic changes that have taken place domestically and internationally have resulted in the transformation from an industry-dependent economy to an information-centered economy that is dependent on new technologies and expansion of industries that provide services.^[25] From an educational standpoint, such transformations were projected through federal reports, such as A Nation at Risk in 1983 and What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future in 1996. In these reports, economic success could be assured if students developed the capacity to learn how to “manage teams… and…work together successfully in teams”.^[26]

The continuing development of Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, multiplayer games, online communities, and Twitter, among others, has changed the manner in which students communicate and collaborate.

See also :

• Collaborative Partnerships: Business/Industry-Education
• Learning circle

Music[edit]

Main article: Classical music written in collaboration

Musical collaboration occurs when musicians in different places or groups work on the same album or song. Collaboration between musicians, especially with regards to jazz, is often heralded as the epitome of complex collaborative practice. Special websites as well as software have been created to facilitate musical collaboration over the Internet resulting in the emergence of Online Bands.

Several awards exist specifically for collaboration in music:

• Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals—awarded since 1988
• Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals—awarded since 1995
• Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration—awarded since 2002

Entertainment[edit]

Collaboration in entertainment is a relatively new phenomenon brought on with the advent of social media, reality TV, and video sharing sites such as YouTube andVimeo. Collaboration occurs when writers, directors, actors, producers and other individuals or groups work on the same television show, short film, or feature length film. A revolutionary system has been developed by Will Wright for the production of the TV series title Bar Karma on CurrentTV. Special web-based software, titled Storymaker, has been written to facilitate plot collaboration over the Internet. Organizations such as Orange County Screenwriters Association bring together professional and amateur writers and filmmakers in a collaborative manner for entertainment development.

Publishing[edit]

Collaboration in publishing can be as simple as dual-authorship or as complex as commons-based peer production. Technological examples include Usenet, e-mail lists, blogs and Wikis while 'brick and mortar' examples include monographs (books) and periodicals such as newspapers, journals and magazines.

Science[edit]

Though there is no political institution organizing the sciences on an international level, a self-organized, global network had formed in the late 20th century.^[7]Observed by the rise in co-authorships in published papers, Wagner and Leydesdorff found international collaborations to have doubled from 1990 to 2005.^[7] Whilecollaborative authorships within nations has also risen, this has done so at a slower rate and is not cited as frequently.^[7]

Medicine[edit]

In medicine the physician assistant - physician relationship involves a collaborative plan to be on file with each state board of medicine where the PA works. This plan formally delineates the scope of practice approved by the physician.

Technology[edit]

Due to the complexity of today's business environment, collaboration in technology encompasses a broad range of tools that enable groups of people to work together including social networking, instant messaging, team spaces, web sharing, audio conferencing, video, and telephony. Broadly defined, any technology that facilitates linking of two or more humans to work together can be considered a collaborative tool. Wikipedia, Blogs, even Twitter are collaborative tools. Many large companies are developing enterprise collaboration strategies and standardizing on a collaboration platform to allow their employees, customers and partners to intelligently connect and interact.

Enterprise collaboration tools are centered around attaining collective intelligence and staff collaboration at the organization level, or with partners. These include features such as staff networking, expert recommendations, information sharing, expertise location, peer feedback, and real-time collaboration. At the personal level, this enables employees to enhance social awareness and their profiles and interactions Collaboration encompasses both asynchronous and synchronous methods of communication and serves as an umbrella term for a wide variety of software packages. Perhaps the most commonly associated form of synchronous collaboration is web conferencing using tools such as Cisco TelePresence, Cisco WebEx Meetings, HP Halo Telepresence Solutions, GoToMeeting Web Conferencing, or Microsoft Live Meeting, but the term can easily be applied to IP telephony, instant messaging, and rich video interaction with telepresence, as well. Examples of asynchronous collaboration software include Cisco WebEx Connect, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Sharepoint and MediaWiki.

The effectiveness of a collaborative effort is driven by three critical factors: - Communication - Content Management - Workflow control

The Internet

The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills has made collaborative work dramatically easier. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and test, but the wide reach of the Internet allows such groups to easily form in the first place, even among niche interests. An example of this is the free software movement in software development which produced GNU and Linux from scratch and has taken over development of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org(formerly known as Netscape Communicator and StarOffice).

Commons-based peer production

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Yale's Law professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation. He compares this to firm production (where a centralized decision process decides what has to be done and by whom) andmarket-based production (when tagging different prices to different jobs serves as an attractor to anyone interested in doing the job).

Examples of products created by means of commons-based peer production include Linux, a computer operating system; Slashdot, a news and announcements website; Kuro5hin, a discussion site for technology and culture; Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia; and Clickworkers, a collaborative scientific work. Another example is Socialtext which is a software that uses tools such as wikis and weblogs and helps companies to create a collaborative work environment.

Massively distributed collaboration

The term massively distributed collaboration was coined by Mitchell Kapor, in a presentation at UC Berkeley on 2005-11-09, to describe an emerging activity ofwikis and electronic mailing lists and blogs and other content-creating virtual communities online.

Ballet, like music, technology and the arts, exists through the collaborations of artists, dancers, choreographers, poets, graphic designers, costume designers, and many more. It's reliant on collaboration and should be its greatest stalwart!