The Financial Web Ring fits into this quite nicely, in my opinion
Part 1: Peer Pioneers
A new world: Get your mass collaboration road map set
DON TAPSCOTT AND ANTHONY D. WILLIAMS
Globe and Mail Update
Forget everything you know about the way we do business. Mass collaboration is revolutionizing the corporation, the economy, and nearly every aspect of management. In this seven-part series, co-authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, due out Jan. 2, explain new business models that will empower the prepared firm and destroy those that fail to adjust
Throughout most of human history, hierarchies of one form or another have served as the primary engines of wealth creation and provided a model for institutions such as the church, the military and government.
So pervasive and enduring has the hierarchical mode of organization been that most people assume that there are no viable alternatives. That is, until a new generation of user-friendly collaboration tools unleashed a new force on the world.
It's like someone uncorked the bottle of human ingenuity. Empowered by the growing accessibility of information technologies, millions of people already join forces in self-organized collaborations that produce dynamic new goods and services that rival those of the world's largest and best-financed enterprises.
The quintessential example of mass collaboration is Wikipedia -- a collaboratively created encyclopedia, owned by no one and authored by tens of thousands of enthusiasts. With five full-time employees, it is ten times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica and roughly the same in accuracy.
It runs on a wiki -- software that enables multiple users to edit the content of Web pages. Despite the risks inherent in an open encyclopedia in which everyone can add their views, and constant battles with detractors and saboteurs, Wikipedia continues to grow rapidly in scope, quality and traffic. The English-language version has more than a million entries and there are ninety-two sister sites in languages ranging from Polish and Japanese to Hebrew and Catalan.
While Wikipedia's mission is to make the sum of human knowledge accessible, not all examples of mass collaboration are guided by altruism. Take Linux, an open source operating system that emerged from the hacker-fringes of the Internet in 1991. At first, many doubted the efficacy of an operating system developed by a Web-enabled community of anarchist programmers. Oh how the critics were wrong.
Today, more than a hundred million users of set-top cable boxes, TiVos, Motorola Razrs, and other home appliances use Linux, and more than a billion people use it indirectly whenever they access Google, Yahoo, or myriad other websites. If you drive a BMW, chances are its running Linux. All considered, Linux-related hardware and services produce billions of dollars of revenue annually and now IBM, HP, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Sony, and dozens of other companies are dedicating serious resources to its development.
What should today's business manager make of this? First, if you can make an operating system and encyclopedia through mass collaboration, consider what might come next? How about a mutual fund (
http://www.marketocracy.com), a peer-to-peer lending system (
http://www.zopa.com), designer t-shirts (
http://www.threadless.com), or just about any physical good one can imagine (
http://www.cambrianhouse.com)?
Second, don't assume that the new collective action represents only a threat to established businesses. While some fear mass collaboration will reduce the proportion of our economy that is available for profitable activity, smart firms are proving otherwise. Networked models of innovation and value creation can bring the prepared manager rich new possibilities to unlock innovative potential in a wide range of resources that thrive inside and outside the firm. For example, IBM estimates that working with the open source community saves it nearly a billion dollars per year over what it would cost to develop a Linux-like operating system on its own.
Finally, get your mass collaboration road map ready. Barriers to entry are vanishing and the trade-offs that individuals make when deciding to contribute voluntarily to projects and organizations are changing, creating opportunities to dramatically reconfigure the way we produce and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. Companies that recognize, address, and learn to tap mass collaboration will benefit, while those that ignore and resist will miss important opportunities for innovation and cost reduction, and may even go out of business. Now that the genie's been unleashed, there's no putting it back in the bottle.
Don Tapscott is CEO of New Paradigm, a technology and business think tank, and the author of 10 books about information technology in business and society, including Paradigm Shift, Growing Up Digital.
Anthony D. Williams is an author and researcher with experience in the impact of new technologies on social and economic life.He is vice- president and executive editor at New Paradigm.
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Suffer the children
Part 1: Peer Pionneers
Part 2: Ideagoras
Part 3: Prosumers
Part 4: The New Alexandrians
Part 5: Platforms for Innovation
Part 6: The Global Plant Floor
Part 7: 'Us' power