The exciting part of the world painted by Wikinomics (Tapscott) is the potential for collaboration across borders and boundaries. Considering what is core and what could be done outside borders and boundaries is the first step. As Howard Rheingold says “collective action involves freely chosen self selection and distributed coordination”. This concept of self selection is where the real value can be uncovered, if you invite people to contribute to something they feel passionate about then real involvement follows. Open source as exemplified by Linux led the way and now even the big corporate like IBM and P&G are starting to think about how you open up IP to maximise its value.
The new collaboration economy is based around four phenomenon:
- Blogosphere – the ability to hold a running commentary and conversation allows real time interests and collaboration to occur, linking people with similar passions and interests together.
- Collective intelligence – the idea of the wisdom of crowds holds great potential when skills and knowledge are globally distributed and we live in a world where we can all connect – the Global Talent Pool.
- New public squares – as someone with a background in knowledge management and an interest in deliberative spaces for citizen engagement this resonates immensely with where I see true value could be built in working together in a technology space.
- Emergent/Serendipitous Innovation – this marries well with my other interest of complexity and the need to create spaces where sense making can occur rather than forcing a top down approach.
Two examples from the first part of the book stand out: Firstly takingITglobal: an example of where technology can cross borders and connect young people in issues that matter to them. Its potential is for learning in innovative ways which harness technical spaces: participatory active learning could achieve real differences to the textbook learning methods.
Secondly the California Open Source Textbook: here is a real life example of harnessing individuals’ knowledge and passion for the greater good. The collaboration and working together between parents, teachers and students in building content and delivering it through a wiki could revolutionize school materials.
The fundamental tough part of this work centres around the question that must be answered:
What is the important question?
This should then drive resource allocation and help with integrating solutions. Creating these open spaces also holds latent power for improving government transparency, our ability as stakeholders to scrutinize grows rapidly the more information there is online.
In the UK we can now see the voting records of our MPs: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ and we can now start to consider what open source government may look like. Looking at this idea through the lens of the qualities Tapscott considers important for this work: candor, transparency, freedom, flexibility, expansiveness, engagement and access, may be the starting point: how and on what can we engage and co-create? Could we make better decisions if we were to tap the insights of a broader amd more representative body of participants asks Tapscott. This technology holds the potential to act as a “platform to co-create our services, communities and experiences”.
