infoarch

A while back I read Wikinomics , by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. I really enjoyed it. So when they published a new book, Macrowikinomics. Rebooting Business and the World , I was curious, bought and read it. The book Wikinomics was about the power of mass collaboration for business. But this new model of collaboration goes beyond a business or technology trend. It's a "more encompassing societal shift". So, this new book wants to show how wikinomics and its core principles can be applied to society and all of its institutions. Principles What are the wikinomics principles? The 6 principles summarized for you with a quote. Collaboration - "... the collective knowledge, capability, and resources embodied within broad horizontal networks of participants can accomplish much more than one organization or one individual can acting alone. Of course, hierarchies won't disappear from the economy in the foreseeable future. Nor are we likely to see large top-...

Writing reviews about the books I´ve been reading isn't easy I find. For some reason when I finish a book I postpone writing a review for a long time. I'm open to tips to posting it soon. Review while you're reading? Block the calendar, focus and type it out? Well, I hope to share my comments on a couple of great books I've read. Free by Chris Anderson, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, Grown up digital by Don Tapscott and The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. These books were an interesting and enjoyable read. Currently I'm reading two books and planning to read three more. I'm reading The Cluetrain Manifesto by Levine et al (actually re-reading it, with the 'Cluetrain-10-years-later-commentary') and What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. The other three books that are waiting on my desk are: The Living Company , The Information and The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown & Lang Div...

My Dutch newspaper ( NRC , Dec. 18, 2008) had a nice short article with very interesting content (- no link available, so I'll provide source link). The Journal RNA Biology is now requiring papers to be peer-reviewed twice. Once on Wikipedia . And once by the journal's own review panel. A summary of the paper must be submitted to Wikipedia first, before the paper is published in the journal. I think this is good for the scientists wanting to publish an article. Who knows what kind of interesting corrections and extensions will be made to the central thought of their paper. And it's also good news for general public as well. Expert information (on RNA in this case) is published publicly and shared with us all. It would be nice to see other journals open up as well! I was also thinking this could or should be applied inside companies as well. In most companies employees write reports and they're submitted to an archive or document management system, after being fo...

On his blog David Gurteen points to an article he in InsideKnowledge titled "Open and Transparent" . I must have missed this article... But I'm glad he pointed to it (again). It's a nice short article on the difference between 'open' and 'transparent'. And how these two worlds are changing (or must change) our life as knowledge workers. I was planning on summarizing it for you, but you just have to read it all. It's worth your time. I will pass on his definition of 'open' and 'transparent' for you: If you are open-minded, not closed, you are open to new ideas, to new thoughts, to new people and to new ways of working. When you come across new things you are curious and eager to explore them. You are non-judgmental and you look to engage other people in conversation – not so much in debate, but more in dialogue. (...) If you are transparent, you work in a way which naturally enables people to see what you are doing. You publish you...

Luis Suarez gave us another update on his venture to give up on work email. Interestingly he remarks this week more emails were sent to him. He thinks this has to do with all the meetings he was in. Because people could not reach him using social media tools, they started emailing again! This relates very well to what Andrew McAfee calls "slack". For social media to be used, you need some slack in your work/work day. I wrote about that some time ago . Luis also pointed to an interesting Wikinomics post titled " Wiki collaboration leads to happiness ". This post has an interesting figure comparing wiki's to email. I agree with Luis that this figure can be applied to other social media tools as well.

Just wanted to point you to this post on the Wikinomics site: there's a new (first?) dissertation on 'mass collaboration' ! Here's the link to the site (of course it's a wiki!) of the new "Dr." Haven't read it yet, but did print it to read it soon.

Some time ago I commented on an essay by Larry Sanger titled "Who says we know" . In short the essay: ... questions the "epistemic egalitarianism" adagium of Wikipedia. Simply stated: everybody is equal, an expert is not more (knowledgable) than a non-expert, together we define what is true. I went on to say: I understand the point he's making. And, though I too am enthralled by the success of Wikipedia, I also wonder how Wikipedia will solve, for instance, the "edit wars", that Sanger also mentions. Don't we need a mediator/expert to end those wars? Or can we simply allow two definitions to one entry? Another solution could be to get in between Sanger and Wikipedia. Every now and then we would let experts in Wikipedia and have them correct, extend, etc. the entries. After they've come in, we let "the rest of the world" in, etc. In this way we have expert and non-expert "waves". Well, it seems Veropedia comes clos...

There are lots of wiki tools our there. At work we use Mediawiki . Mediawiki works fine, although it takes a while to get used to it. One thing Mediawiki doesn't have is a good WYSIWYG editor. And it would be nice to be able to drag and drop your text, files, pictures, etc. onto the wiki, without having to think about how you would do that. Just like, just released, PikiWiki can do. I signed up and played around with it for some time. It's great. What PikiWiki can do is, as of today, the standard.

Take a look at Tara Hunt's blog for an interesting list of community archetypes . She states: This is a very very rough draft of the outline for what the Archetypes look like in a community (mostly thrown up here from TextPad notes). It is important to note that all of these community archetypes play highly positive roles in various communities. In my post on the Wikinomics book , I mentioned that I miss wiki-roles (or archetypes) in the book. Could this list be a good starting point? It looks like it. However w.r.t. wiki's I miss a role in Tara's list. I'd call them: ‘pruners’/'cleaners’. These people that go through wiki pages, don't really add content, but make sure the content is readable. They remove typos, correct layout issues, etc. Is there such a or a comparable role in communities?

Business Week published an interesting article on "The End of Work As You Know It" . It tries to give us a peek in the future, based on mechanisms that many books have laid out for us, such as "The World is Flat" and "Wikinomics" . The article ends with: All that raises a fundamental question about technology's ultimate impact on workers. Will this be a new world of empowered individuals encased in a bubble of time-saving technologies? Or will it be a brave new world of virtual sweatshops, where all but a tech-savvy few are relegated to an always-on world in which keystrokes, contacts, and purchases are tracked and fed into the faceless corporate maw? It's safe to say we'll see some of both. But perhaps we can comfort ourselves by realizing that, while technology will change the nature of work, it can't change human nature. "All of these technologies," says Charles Grantham, executive producer of the research group Work ...

Finished reading "Wikinomics" by Tapscott and Williams . It's a wonderful book. Well written, stimulating and worth your time! After reading the book I was left with two questions: Does wikinomics also apply to a very structured environment, with structured, well-defined work processes? And if so, how do you apply it to such an environment? What are typical wiki(nomic) roles people can take? With a "role" I mean e.g. "publishers" and "pruners". And how do you learn your role in the wiki world? I read in the wikinomics playbook some text (in Part One ) about the second question. But it's still more about a characteristic of the wikinomic person and not about the different roles people can take. Does anyone have answers to these questions? Or pointers to parts of the answer?

Practically finished reading "Wikinomics. How mass collaboration changes everything" by Tapscott and Williams. I'm fairly new to blogging and still see my blog as an experiment. However I'm getting the hang of it and I enjoy blogging more and more. But I've been trying to pinpoint 'why I blog'. On page 256 of "Wikinomics" I ran into the perfect description: In a traditional workplace ... problem solving (comment by blogger: or idea generation) might be worked out in the lunchroom, while leaning over a colleague's cubicle, over a pint after work, or increasingly through a long thread of e-mails. The problem is that this casual approach to problem solving leaves no organizational memory of the event, with the risk that only the people involved in creating the solution walk away with any new insights. Problems persist like a bad cold, and solutions will be reinvented every time the problem reoccurs. Social software provides companies with a wa...