[Air-L] Peter Kollock, RIP

[Barry Wellman]

>From Marc Smith's Connected Action Blog

 Barry Wellman
 _______________________________________________________________________

My friend, colleague and teacher Peter Kollock
January 13th, 2009 by Marc Smith

I share the loss of Peter Kollock with the many people who knew him.
Peter died Saturday after a motorcycle accident near his home. Many people
in the social sciences and beyond have been influenced by Peter's works of
scholarship, teaching, mentorship, entreprenurship and friendship.

Peter had a big impact on his many students at UCLA and the larger
academic community that built on his scholarship.   A lecture from Peter
was a great thing that left his audiences feeling both smarter and
challenged with a whole new landscape of choices.  Peter brought many
people to a better appreciation of the issues of cooperation and conflict,
collective action and common goods, of trust and deception in risky
transactions.  He made it clear how most of our biggest challenges on this
planet are cooperation dilemmas.  He gave many of his students the
inspiration to think that conflicts could be resolved and cooperation
sustained by leveraging insights from studies of these situations.  His
was the only class I ever took that proved mathematically that it paid to
be good to other people, even if there were short term costs.  He saw
early on the importance of communication networks to change the landscape
of cooperation and collective action.  His scholarship extended to the
very real world of high tech entrepreneurship- building tools for markets
on the Internet.

My thoughts are with his family and friends who appreciate the great
presence Peter had.

I am shocked by his loss and will miss him deeply.

http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/01/13/my-friend-colleague-and-teacher-peter-kollock/