Thanks for the useful and provocative post, Harold. I have a few questions.

First, can you say more when you say cooperation is not a soft skill? (Or for that fact, what distinguishes a soft from a hard skill?)

Second, you say cooperation doesn't have shared objectives. I want to throw in a bit of a twist. Like the hard-to-identify transition between communities and networks, the transition between cooperation and collaboration can be equally fuzzy. What starts as cooperation around common interest can segue to objectives of collaboration. What is critical is finding the common interest that triggers cooperation --however it ends up or evolves.

Some of the declarations you made, i.e. "communities of practice cooperate," are mutable. So while I am agreeing at the conceptual level, I'd be cautious about these stronger categorizations. Collaboration and cooperation happen in communities and networks. Cooperation also happens in organizations.

It is what people do that matters, no?