Plays Well with Others
By Creative Commons
Plays Well with OthersFeb 19, 2019
What Do an Army of Ants and an Online Encyclopedia Have in Common?
“Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions,” according to Wikipedia. “The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent.” Wikipedia should know all about stigmergy, since it’s almost a perfect description of how Wikipedia itself is made. While this model of collaboration is most commonly associated with ants, not global knowledge sharing, we’ll explore both and how they’ve shaped our world through asynchronous collaboration.
Join us as we talk to Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation (the nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia), and Clint Penick, an ant researcher and assistant research professor in the Biomimicry Center at Arizona State University.
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All original content in Plays Well with Others is available under a Creative Commons BY license.
This episode contains music by Blue Dot Sessions, available under a Creative Commons BY-NC license at the Free Music Archive.
We also use sound effects, available under CC licenses and in the public domain, from Freesound.
For links to these tracks and for more information about our show, please visit playswellwithothers.org.
I Laughed So Hard I Cried
On our first episode, we look at how collaboration happens in one of comedy's most storied (and tough) environments — the TV writers' room. It's where the magic happens, but it can also be one of the most brutally competitive places a creative person will ever work. We talk to two writer-comedians, Anne Lane and Wayne Federman, about their experiences working in writers' rooms on shows like Rick and Morty and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
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All original content in Plays Well with Others is available under a Creative Commons BY license.
Coming Soon
From Creative Commons, a new podcast about the art and science of collaboration. With a focus on the tools, techniques, and mechanics of collaboration, we’re going to explore how today's most interesting collaborators are making new things, solving old problems, and getting things done — together. Hosted by Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley. Premieres Tuesday, February 19.