What is collaborative technology?

Technology that does not work in place of people, but helps people — especially people of different positions and cultures — think, decide and make things together. The phrase appears in the subtitle of the book ⿻ Plurality, whose Part 5 sets out concrete examples, from deliberation and voting to markets and creative work.

When people hear "technological progress", many picture machines taking over people's work. But technology can also point in another direction: helping people talk things over, decide and create together. The book ⿻ Plurality calls technology of this second kind "collaborative technology", and uses the phrase in its subtitle.

In short

Collaborative technology is technology that helps people think, decide and make things together.

The book describes using digital tools "not to replace humans or trust", but to channel the energy in social diversity toward progress rather than conflict [1]. The subtitle of the English edition is "The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy" [2]. The Japanese edition's title is PLURALITY 対立を創造に変える、協働テクノロジーと民主主義の未来 (Plurality: turning conflict into creation — the future of collaborative technology and democracy) [3].

For example

The book itself. The book's text was managed with Git, a tool software developers use to keep track of changes, and released under CC0 (a waiver of copyright that lets anyone use it freely) [4]. The priorities of the work and the rewards for it were decided with an approach similar to crowdfunding. Contributions were recorded with a community currency and group identity tokens. Points of disagreement were settled with discussion tools. The book says it was made with the tools described in its Part 5, so as "to show as well as tell" [4].

Wikipedia and open source. The book points to Wikipedia, which anyone can edit, and to open-source software (software whose blueprint is published so anyone can improve it), represented by Linux and GitHub [5]. In the book's view, both are "nodes of light": large-scale successes of self-governance through open collaboration [5].

Engelbart's "mother of all demos". With support from ARPA, the US research funding agency, Douglas Engelbart showed a system called NLS that included the mouse and hypertext (a way of linking documents to one another) [6]. It came "six short years" after J. C. R. Licklider of ARPA first funded the work [6]. The book presents this as a leading example of a tradition that uses machines to extend human intelligence rather than replace it [6].

How it works

What the book means by "collaboration"

Chapter 5-0 describes collaboration as "the working of several entities (people or groups) together towards a common goal" [7]. But what the book really focuses on is "the power that working together has to create something greater than the sum of what the parts could have created separately" [7]. The book calls this by a mathematical name, "supermodularity".

The gains here are not only money. The book says they are defined by what the participants and communities themselves value [7].

Widening the meaning of "democracy"

Part 5 is titled "Democracy". But the book notes that what it describes "goes well beyond many conventional descriptions of democracy as a system of governance of nations", and covers every kind of collaboration [7]. The preface also restates the idea: "Plurality captures the symbiotic relationship between democracy and collaborative technology" [8].

Depth and breadth

Collaboration involves a trade-off [9]. You can connect deeply with a few similar people, or shallowly with many different people. The book describes "depth" as how much more is created than the sum of the parts, and "breadth" as how far people are included across social and cultural distance [9].

The book shows a chart (Figure 5-0-A) that places everything from intimate relationships to states and markets along a single curve [9]. The goal of Plurality is "to push this frontier outward at every point along it" — to raise depth and breadth at the same time [9]. According to the book, even the debate between "deliberative" and "electoral" democracy concerns just two points on this curve, both mostly within the "state" range [9].

Design principles

The book wants to avoid two failures [10]. One is fixing a single goal at the start and trying to maximize it, which it calls "premature optimization". The other is technology with no guiding goal that simply imitates social life. The book says such technology is easily captured by power and profit [10].

As a principle that runs between the two, the book puts forward: "we develop tools that allow greater cooperation and consensus at the same time as they make space for greater diversity" [10].

There is also the danger that building bridges across differences wears those differences down, so that everyone becomes alike. So the book also includes regenerating diversity among its goals [11].

In history

According to chapter 3-3, the idea goes back to "Man-Computer Symbiosis", the vision put forward by Licklider of ARPA [6]. Licklider and Taylor's paper "The Computer as a Communication Device" (1968 in the main text, 1967 in the book's footnote) belongs to the same line. The book writes that it described much of what would become the culture of personal computing, the internet and even smartphones decades later [12].

What is debated

The criticism that technology cannot fix democracy. A review by Ralf Grötker in Netopia argues that the success of the opinion-gathering tool Polis depends on whether governments take it up, and that democracy is in the end a question of power [13]. Grötker goes on to describe the book as "solutionism", the belief that technology can solve anything [13].
The book itself admits the danger of everyone becoming alike. It says bridging can reduce diversity, and each chapter of Part 5 is set up to discuss risks such as this and ways to lessen them [11][14].
A note on translation. The glossary of the Turkish translation states that "collaborative" is not to be translated as "işbirlikçi", because in Turkish that word carries the meaning of someone who collaborates with the enemy [15]. Instead it uses "işbirliğine dayalı" (based on cooperation) [15].

Where it fits in Plurality

Collaborative technology is the subject of the book's Part 5, "Democracy". Chapter 5-0 lays out the framework, and seven chapters follow, from the deep end to the broad end [1][9]:

The book's summary says "the core of ⿻ is technology for collaboration across social difference" [1]. This is the definition of Plurality itself. For more, see the article on collaboration across social difference.

The foundation is Part 4's rights operating system: the basic protocols for identity, association, commerce, property and access. In a political context, the idea connects to Digital Democracy.

Sources

Plurality, part summaries (Part 3 and Part 5) — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/blob/86158859464aee75633acd854c656928121a7fd8/contents/english/8-blurb.md ［CC0］
Plurality, bibliographic details — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality
Ken Suzuki, commentary on the Japanese edition of Plurality (in Japanese) — https://note.com/digitaldemocracy/n/nb8b59a6b775d
Plurality, 5-0 "Collaborative Technology and Democracy", opening — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 3-3 "The Lost Dao", subsection "Nodes of light" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, subsections "Sputnik and the Advanced Research Projects Agency" and "The Intergalactic Computer Network" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-0, the paragraphs after the section break — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, Preface — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/1/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-0, section "The depth-breadth spectrum" and Figure 5-0-A — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, section "Goals, affordances and multipolarity" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, end of the section "Collaboration across diversity: promise and challenges" and section "Regenerating diversity" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 3-3, subsection "A network of networks" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Ralf Grötker, "Why Technology Can't "Fix" Democracy" (Netopia, 2026-08-16) — https://www.netopia.eu/why-technology-cant-fix-democracy/
Plurality, 5-0, the paragraph at the end of the chapter describing the structure of Part 5 — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Glossary of the Turkish translation (in Turkish) — https://github.com/omgbbqhaxx/plurality

We welcome error reports and questions ("What is…?"). Submissions become public issues.

Report an error in this article ・ Ask a question