The MIT Media Lab’s Scalable Cooperation group is no longer active. This site provides background on some of the people and projects that were associated with this research. The most current information about Media Lab research can be found in our Research section.
Over millennia, humans have invented various forms of social organization to govern themselves—from tribes and city states to kingdoms and democracies. These institutions allow us to scale our ability to coordinate, cooperate, exchange information, and make decisions. Today, social media provides new ways to connect and build virtual institutions, enabling us to address societal problems of planetary scale in a time-critical fashion. More significantly, advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer optimization help us reimagine human problem-solving.