The Globe and Mail features a 7-part article series written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, the authors of Wikinomics (How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything)
The focus is on how businesses today can take advantage of technologies and practices based on collaborative posterchild Wikipedia (“the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit“):
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.
Tapscott and Williams provide these insights in the first article:
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.
…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.
