In discussing collaboration and mutual knowledge, I noted that there are cases of collaboration based on something less than mutual knowledge. What all these cases have in common is that the person said to be collaborating is working towards a goal with the supposition of others working towards the same goal.
Consider the MonoTrans project: I was invited by an on-screen message to assist in the translation of a children's book by completing some simple, monolingual tasks. In accepting the invitation, I adopted certain goals with the supposition that those goals also had been or would be adopted by other people whose work, along with mine, would result in those shared goals being reached. I knew that without work by others, the goal of translating a children's book could not be achieved.
The collaborative supposition changed my behavior. Without the collaborative supposition, I still might have completed the tasks if doing so contributed towards reaching one or more of my individual goals, such as satisfying my curiosity about MonoTrans and giving me something to write about. However, in this case, I might have spent a shorter time on the tasks, giving less attention to the accuracy or quality of my work. When I say "without the collaborative supposition," I mean without any knowledge, belief, or assumption that there would be work by others based on a shared goal. If everyone who completed the monolingual tasks worked in this fashion, would their efforts be sufficient to meet the project's requirements and thus result in the successful translation of a children's book? In the case of MonoTrans, the answer may be yes.
A MonoTrans translation project is designed to present a series of tasks, each of which is very easy. In general, participants will find it simplest to work on the tasks as the project's designers intended. If there are some users who perform incompetently or maliciously, their numbers will be small enough to allow their contributions to be detected and discarded as outliers. In addition, each task requires a very small amount of time and effort, and participants can decide how many tasks to perform. If enough people participate, the translation project will succeed, even if each participant contributes only a small effort.
Being structured in this way, it might be possible for a MonoTrans translation project to have contributing participants who are not even aware of the project's end goal. For example, without being told anything more about the project, participants could be asked to complete some simple editing tasks in exchange for some small compensation.
In a sense, the efforts of such participants could be considered collaborative. They would be working together in that their efforts would be coordinated and combined. Their collective efforts, though individual in nature, would result in the achievement of a unitary goal. However, as both the goal and the coordination of efforts would be outside the knowledge of the participants, I will refer to such efforts as extrinsic collaboration to differentiate them from what we more typically refer to by the term collaboration.
During World War II, the terms "collaboration" and "collaborator" acquired a negative association in Allied nations. Specifically, those acting as "collaborators" did so with knowledge of the goals to which their voluntary actions would contribute, and the possession of such knowledge made those actions, in effect, a declaration of allegiance to those goals. Someone who acted in the same way as a result of ignorance or deception might be referred to as a "puppet" or "pawn," but they would not in fairness have been labeled a "collaborator."
In typical usage, the term "collaboration" implies the knowledge, belief or assumption of working with others towards a shared goal. When the term is used in this sense, collaboration requires the collaborative supposition.
