Wikinomics (2006)
Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams
Publisher: Portfolio
Peering and collaboration
current day web is full of participation ‘harness the new collaboration or perish’
set to drive innovation in business
wellbeing, futures etc need to prepare people for this world not just give them a glimpse
Amateurs disrupting many activities previously the provence of professionals
For example, p65 Wikipedia as peer production’ eg Wikipedia & London bombing super fast dissemination of uncensored accounts.
‘thousands of dispersed volunteers can create fast, fluid & innovative projects that outperform those of the lasgest and best financed enterprises’
p12
‘ a world where value creation will be fast, fluid, and persistently disruptive’
Four principles
P30
- Openness
- Peering
- sharing
- acting globally
does peering need modularity?
opportunity to self organise
p33
‘realignments of competitive advantage’
example p38
description of Flikr ‘Flikr provides the basic technology platform and free hosting for photos ( more sophisticated services are available by subscription). Users do everything else…… They create their own self organising classification system for the site. They even build most of the applications that members use to access, upload, manipulate and share their content. And increasingly users license their photos for non commercial use’
Influence of the Net Generation
Consider a different take on the Net generation by combining with the new web
New web + Net Gen p46 ‘ bring a new ethic of openness, participation and
interactiveness’…. ‘ a demographic engine of collaboration’
New web influences
Tag = metadata = data about data
P41 tagging collaboratively leads to folksonomy
P42 del.icio.us – a way to remember in public
p42 ‘ convergencies around tags naturally happen’
peer to peer opinion is the influence rather than mass media & marketing
p52 Net – gen ‘renegotiate the definitions of copyright and intellectual property’
‘ the ability to remix media, hack products, or otherwise tamper with consumer culture is their birthright’
273 ‘the 3 golden rules –
- nobody owns it
- everyone uses it,
- anyone can add services to it
are what distinguish the internet from previous communication mediums’
Net generation influences
240 ‘as young people enter the workforce they bring high –technology adoption, creativity, social connectivity, fun and diversity to the companies they work for’
Wikis & Wikipedia
‘p72
‘wiki’ as a concept invented by Word Cunningham in March 1995’
Wiki can be an organisational memory
John Seely Brown – wikis as a bottom up phenomena. Allow a share in control (and therefore enable to trust), ease and efficient collaboration.
p255 evolve flexibly because ‘ at their most basic they are completely unstructured’
p256
Allows for point of time dependent granularity amongst contributors.
‘wikis compel teams to engage in a constant state of rapid prototyping’
Open source movement influences
P82
IBM supporting Linux and also Apache ‘ its partnering and collaboration skills and its specific knowledge of how to manage relationships with communities it does not directly control are strategic tools competitors have yet to master’
p278 ‘openness does up the ante it drives real value to the fore and forces every company to competeon a level playing field’
Prosumption ( Don, 1996) ‘gap between consumers and producers is blurring’
e.g. Second Life. Linden lab provides ? , users provide the rest and also content by coproducing. ( “Linden lab gets up to 23.000 hours of free development effort from eirts users each day’
P127
- Big impact with fewer resources, scales in a way that centrally designed systems cannot,
- benefits from feedback loops that are difficult for competitors to reverse
- innovates more rapidly
- engages stakeholders, loyal communities – because they have control
‘the new prosumers treat the world as a place for creation not consumption’
p128 ‘ by the modification that they make lead users serve as a beacon for where the mainstream market is headed’
p136
Apple (ipod) and Sony(Playstation) don’t encourage product hacking but for how long? As technology savy becomes the norm.
P143 Youtube ‘ millions of members relish the opportunity to heap praise on the clever videos whilst the less clever get seriously flamed.
P145 digg – news items that anyone can post to ‘news has become a social pastime’
Web mashups
P191 on mobile devices ‘the combination of maps and search technology (web mashup) will serve as a key linkage between physical and virtual worlds.’
P201 there is the potential to use mashups etc to get value from public information.
Impact on business and organisations
P236 ‘ companies with the capability to orchestrate collaboration on a global scale are still few in number’ – ‘there will be handsome rewards for those who learn the subtle art of weaving together the skills and competencies of disparate players to create globally integrated ecosystems for designing and making physical things’
240 ‘ increasingly employers are using blogs, wikis and other new tools to collaborate and form adhoc communities across departmental and organisational boundaries’ ‘ the result is number of deep, longterm transformations in the culture, structure, process and economics of work’
Geek squad example
Wear black & white including the VWs leads to ‘ branding and smart hiring aside, Stephens has learned to engage his agents in a continuous process of innovation & improvement that keeps the agents motivated to perform at the highest level’
Geek squad organiser Stephens had set up a wiki but found that geeks self-organised by playing Battlefield
P243 ‘instead of trying to set an agenda I’m going to try and discover their agenda and serve it’
Personal broadcasting
P251 ‘drilling holes through the hierarchy of an organisation can produce great results’
Consider that there are 5 work place functions -: teaming, time allocation, decision making, resource allocation , communications
Teams:
Amazon – 140,000 volunteer developers are building applications and businesses
Wikipedia – 16.000
Thousands on Linux
All three lots o teams are highly federated and highly flexible.
In contrast take a traditional model such as the US military. There are 150 members of a team as standard and considered optional for an operating unit
Time allocation;
Google give 20% time to ‘goof off” leads to personal projects that are not on the Google roadmap and these turn out to be the very projects that are actually adopted by Google
Good metaphors:
- work place of the past, a military band; workplace of the future , improvised jazz.
- To the Net generation computer is not a box but a doorway
p209’ when McEwen ( Goldcoys mining) released proprietary data on the Internet and challenged the world to do the prospecting, he transformed a lumbering exploration process into a modern distributed gold discovery machine.
p280 need to ‘devise control points and collaborative processes for weeding out poor contributions and assembling end products’
How can orgs and businesses get collaboration right
288
- make sure that all individuals can harvest some value; remember there will be diverse motivations so value will be diverse
- keep barriers to participation low
- abide by community norms ( Wikipedia set a good example here)
- let the process evolve
Interesting other
Lego example
p130
‘Lego uses mindstorms.lego.com to encourage tinkering with its software ‘ now consumer services extended to Lego bricks, Downloadable 3-D modelling program to allow the design of a virtual toy’
How to personalise health management?
