I recommend watching the presentation by Howard Rheingold on www.ted.com where he talks about collaboration. His central thesis is that wealth in human culture has been developed by complex forms of collaboration; in the form of surplus protein in hunter gatherer societies who collaborated to hunt mega-fauna, through to current day capitalism which is based on a common adherence to collective rules and shared risk (insurance, shareholders). His argues that humans have a natural instinct to work cooperatively in groups.

In the fiercely competitive business world, companies are setting up institutional arrangements to encourage cooperation and “open sourcing” information, as and by doing so, enriching themselves. In fact this has created a whole new economy. In the NGO world, ThinkCycle has been established – a website where NGOs put up design problems for people to help solve.

In Australia’s NRM world, how can we capture this innate property of human beings? In fact, the origins of NRM begin in Landcare, a grass-roots movement that began when farmers and conservations agreed to cooperate to attract resources and energy into rehabilitating degraded resources back in the late 1980s. Perhaps this world has become overly driven by bureaucracy and political interference. The world of blogging, information sharing, collective problem solving and social networking that has revolutionised other industries such as the media, medicine, banking and commerce, could also revolutionise the way we collectively go about managing our natural resources. It could help link science directly to farmers, conservationists to investors and communities to each other. Of course it is not the whole answer, but given the way these tools have effected other sectors of society, there is no reason it could not do the same for NRM.