Experts say what they’d like to see happen in 2004 and what they think will happen.

Howard Rheingold, author and virtual community pioneer:

“I wish an interdisciplinary investigation (PDF) of human cooperation and collective action would begin to emerge in 2004, bringing together scientists, scholars and practitioners in self-organizing Internet politics, peer-to-peer computation, the sociology of managing common pool resources, the economics of open-source production, the biology of symbiosis, and the evolutionary psychology of cooperation around the nature, dynamics, barriers and multipliers of human cooperation.

“What probably will happen is that my colleagues and I will begin to put together a map of this emerging field and then stalwartly paddle upstream against the institutional tides of specialization — because universities, corporate research, and foundation funders succeed by specializing and risk failure by broadening their interests across disciplinary boundaries, thus building into our civilization’s knowledge-gathering institutions a strong negative incentive against seeing (or looking for) big pictures.”