Open Collaboration.

Founders of the Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters Association, Inc. have individually been very open in their intellectual efforts, often widely advertising their work in progress across relevant web forums. Three of the founding members developed or improved their PhD research as a consequence of being attracted to the group through such open sharing of ideas. Although the core group is centered in Melbourne, Australia, one of these (then) students joined us from the USA, and another from Sydney. Several other members have been similarly attracted to join from outside the original circle, in a way that incidentally provided us with an understanding of the spontaneous emergence and development of communities of practice as discussed in Nousala, S. & Hall, W.P. 2008. Emerging Autopoietic Communities – Scalability of Knowledge Transfer in Complex Systems.

Several of us have been involved in collaborative projects crossing disparate disciplines. For example one project combines cognitive science, biology, knowledge management, business process improvement and military affairs to give a new understanding of the interactions of observation, orientation, decision and action along the time axis in organizational decision making, as represented in the paper, Hall, W.P., Dalmaris, P., Else, S., Martin, C.P., Philp, W.R. 2007. Time value of knowledge: time-based frameworks for valuing knowledge. Several projects in the knowledge management area involve crossing disciplines of biology, organization theory, information systems, epistemology, and business management.

Some of us have also been involved in open source software development and in collaborative knowledge building projects such as Wikipedia, which are examples of open collaboration working at its best.

Our personal experiences with open collaboration are reflected in our idea that the Kororoit Institute will in Australia aspire to follow the all too rare examples of organizations like Santa Fe Institute, the New England Complex Systems Institute, and Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, who exist to bring together people from diverse disciplines to collaborate on extending our theoretical and practical understandings of complex and intractible problems in the world.