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Thank you for your comments! In the first couple of paragraphs, I was speaking to Friedman's observations on pages 93 - 125 (but also themes peppered throughout the book). I was attempting to get at this notion that "collaboration" in the sense of a flat world is NOT a top-down or single goal oriented phenomenon. Rather, it is individual contributions at unique points of common intersection ... which relates to Friedman's notion of "uploading". Using Friedman's Wikipedia example ... a tremendous amount of collaboration occurs which results in a cohesive "thing" called Wikipedia, but collaboration is accomplished in bits and pieces of "uploaded" content produced to satisfy the individual interests and motivations of the contributing participants.

The same is true for the examples he shares re: community based software. While the end product ends up being a single usable "thing" (software), the individual needs, motivations, and participation levels of the contributors are very diverse. Using Drupal as an example, I have colleague who is a teacher and he contributes a lot of code and modules to the Drupal project for modules he has created for his own needs in the education field. However, it is very likely that someone in the music field will find value in a podcasting module the guy in education created. The music guy downloads the code, modifies it for his own need, and re-uploads it as an enhancement to the original module contributed by the guy in education. While they both are now contributors and users of the same thing, they really aren't "collaborators" in the tradition sense in that they didn't set out to work together on a solution, but rather due to their individual needs which happened to intersect at this point of need and interest they both devoted time and energy to its creation. Jennifer Maddrell