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The economics of wikis

Amateurs are not drowningout informed and fact-based commentary; they're just replacing the old one-way monologue with increasingly rich and variegated conversations where a billion voices can be heard

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. By Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams. Atlantic Books; 350 pages; Rs 399 Reviewed by Star Business
THE internet is no longer about hooking up online, creating a gardening community, or putting a video on YouTUbe. 'User-generated media' and 'social networks' are just the tip of an iceberg. A new mode of production is in the making.
Thanks to Web 2.0, companies are beginning to conceive, design, develop and distribute products and services in profoundly new ways. The old notion that you have to attract, develop and retain the best and brightest inside your corporate boundaries is becoming null. With the costs of collaboration falling precipitously, companies can increasingly source ideas, innovations and uniquely qualified minds from a vast global pool of talent.
The evidence backs an assertion that the corporation may be going through the biggest change in its short history.
Indeed, the impact of Wikinomics has been quite remarkable. The concept itself has become a word in the vernacular. The word "wikinomics" (small w) is being used in ways and by groups that we never anticipated.
Everyone from urban planners to fundamentalist Christians is discussing the concept. There is even a "Wikinomics for Obama" group on my.barackobama.com. In many countries, large numbers of people and firms are using wikinomics to form communities and innovate collaboratively. Says the Sunday Times: "'wikinomics' is the new force that is bringing people together on the net to create a giant brain."
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams, explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and open-source technology, such as wikis, to be successful. Tapscott and Williams have released a followup to Wikinomics later.
The heart of the idea in the book is not at all newfangled, but as old as economics itself: that the labour of many is always better than the labour of one.
According to the writers, the movement to stop global warming is a good example of mass collaboration in action. We are in the early days of something unprecedented. Thanks to Web 2.0, the entire world is beginning to collaborate around a single idea for the first time ever — changing the weather.
Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue, and all citizens obviously have a stake in the outcome. So for the first time we have one global, multimedia, affordable, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Around the world there are hundreds, probably thousands, of collaborations occurring in which everyone from scientists to schoolchildren is mobilising to do something about carbon emissions. The "killer application" for mass collaboration may turn out to be saving the planet,
literally.
Predictably, however, new paradigms bring dislocation and confusion. They are often received with coolness, or worse — mockery or hostility. Vested interests fight against the shift. Leaders of the old have great difficulty embracing the new.
Wikinomics has certainly had its detractors.
For example, Nicholas Carr, a former editor of the Harvard Business Review, wrote an article, "The Ignorance of Crowds," in which he criticised the writers and others for promoting the power of mass collaboration. Carr argues that "peer production is best viewed as a means for refining the old rather than inventing the new; that it's an optimisation model more than an invention model."
He concludes that only a relatively small and formally organised group of talented professionals can produce
breakthroughs.
As Wikinomics illustrates, nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the most dynamic and exciting products and services today have been produced by teams numbering in the thousands and even millions. Linux — one of the world's leading operating systems — was developed by the largest and most sophisticated software development community in the world. Linux has no employees, stock options, corporate campuses, or free haircuts. There are more than 150,000 similarly open source-based software projects under way, and many of them are viable. Similar peer production communities are currently disrupting many industries, including publishing, media, entertainment, financial services, and manufacturing.
Other critics call Wikinomics a new form of "online collectivism" that threatens our economy and our culture. In The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, pundit Andrew Keen issues a long bleat claiming that the world is awash with drivel because it is so easy to propagate ideas on the internet. He laments the fact that newspaper circulation figures are declining while YouTube videos of skateboarding accidents capture the nation's eyeballs. Keen pines for the good old days — a time when apparently only smart and credible people had access to printing presses and the airwaves. A healthy society needs gatekeepers, he argues. Only then quality can be ensured, so, for example, TV commercials will continue to be produced by experienced and talented directors; and viewers will not be subjected to pathetic wannabe commercials that win contests run by companies looking for cheap advertising.
The irony, of course, is that Keen's critique of the Web 2.0 could just as easily be levelled at the world of professional publishing with its armies of professional editors, fact-checkers, information technology and databases, engineered business processes, reward systems, and all the trappings of an old-style hierarchy. As a recent study by Nature revealed, all of our systems of knowledge production have flaws.
Throughout history, corporations have organised themselves according to strict hierarchical lines of authority. Everyone was a subordinate to someone else — employees versus manag-
ers, marketers versus customers, producers versus supply chain subcontractors, companies versus the community. There was always someone or some company in charge, controlling things at the "top" of the food chain. While hierarchies are not vanishing, profound changes in the nature of technology, demographics, and the global economy are giving rise to powerful new models of production based on community, collaboration, and selforganisation rather than on hierarchy and control.
Millions of media buffs now use blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and personal broadcasting to add their voices to a vociferous stream of dialogue and debate called the "blogosphere." Employees drive performance by collaborating with peers across organisational boundaries, creating what we call a "wiki workplace.” Customers become "prosumers" by cocreating goods and services rather than simply consuming the end product. So-called supply chains work more effectively when the risk, reward, and capability to complete major projects — including massively complex products like cars, motorcycles and airplanes — are distributed across planetary networks of partners who work as peers.
Smart companies are encouraging, rather than fighting, the heaving growth of massive online communi-ties-many of which emerged from the fringes of the web to attract tens of millions of participants overnight. Ever ardent competitors are collaborating on path-breaking scientific initiatives that accelerate discovery in their industries. Indeed, as a growing number of firms see the benefits of mass collaboration, this new way of organising will eventually displace the traditional corporate structures as the economy's primary engine of wealth creation.
Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate they collectively can advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways. Companies that engage with these exploding web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius.