Nature has a way of automatically right-sizing a group to tackle the job at hand. Just like the Russian Matryoshka Dolls (dolls within dolls), small groups link into bigger ones, which in turn link into still bigger ones. In this follow-up article to Why penguins have no commanding officer and Did ants invent the perfect system for communicating via mobile technology?, Ken Thompson writing for NESTA explores what we can learn about teamwork and group/community size from nature's most successful teams.

Howard Rheingold talks on www.TED.com about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.

Could a virtual team have a million members? Recent developments in mass collaboration, distributed computing and the wisdom of crowds suggest the answer might be yes.

Those who don’t believe that humans can swarm and flock must not have been watching the World Cup in Germany. The Mexican Wave, or La Ola, is a spontaneous activity involving very simple individual behaviors which produces an amazing collective result.