Topic:Introduction to Mass Collaboration

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Contents

Topic Highlights

(What you will learn)

  • What is meant by the term mass collaboration
  • Some well-known real-world examples where mass collaboration has been used
  • The concepts and principles of mass collaboration
  • The enabling technologies, including the new web (a.k.a. Web 2.0), Wikis and tools like Google Docs
  • In depth analysis of dancing with the stars

Introduction and Motivation

(Why learn it)

Examples like Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube are making the headlines every day. What's the deal? Are these just a fad limited to the web companies, or, as some are suggesting, is it possible that they represent a new way of doing business?

In this topic, we'll consider how mass collaboration is changing how businesses are run in all sorts of industries, from encyclopedias, to music, to jetliners, to operating systems and even mutual funds. We'll do this by looking at a handful of real-world examples, by learning some of the basic concepts and principles, and by considering the collaborative tools and technologies that make it all possible.

You will also be required to use one of these technologies (a Wiki) to answer your next quiz.

This is the first in a series of topics, designed to bring you up to speed on the concepts of Mass Collaboration, the Wiki Workplace, and Open Business Models.

For those of you wishing to dig a little deeper on this first topic, a starting point is the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams[1]. I recommend it both because it provides a good overview and because it is a good read.

Learning Activities

(How the levels of understanding will be gained)

Learning activities for this topic
Type Name Direction
Lecture and discussion
 Instructor-directed
In-class activities
  • Discussions of real-world examples
 Peer-directed
Reading Self-directed
Quiz Self-directed


Topic Notes: Introduction to Mass Collaboration

These notes are intended to facilitate a class discussion of the topic of mass collaboration.

Let's start with some examples.

We've all heard of Facebook ("a social utility that connects you with the people around you") and YouTube (allowing you to "broadcast yourself"). These are two of the most well-published examples of companies that have made a name for themselves based primarily on mass collaboration.

What makes these companies different?

Let's look at some other examples...

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a is a multilingual, web-based, encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on contributions written collaboratively by volunteers around the world[2].

This means that anyone can edit (almost) any entry in the encyclopedia! Some have argued that this approach should produce nothing more than graffiti. But somehow, it works. It is enormously successful, with over 8 million articles in 253 languages. And, its accuracy has been found to rival that of more established sources. For example, Nature published an article in 2005 in which science entries in Wikipedia were compared to those in the much more established Encyclopaedia Brittanica. They were found to be quite comparable.

Discussion questions:

  • Have you used Wikipedia?
  • Do you trust its content?
  • What makes it so successful?

Goldcorp

Goldcorp is a mining company that was in trouble a few years ago. The gold market was contracting and the company's fifty year old mine in Red Lake Ontario was assumed to be drying up. It's CEO Rob McEwen saved the company by doing something other in the mining industry would never have done: he shared his data with the world[3].

Through a competition where $575,000 was made available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates of where gold would be found in the Red Lake mine, he succeeded in getting input from over 1000 people from 50 countries. The result was astounding: 110 targets were identified on the proprty, more than 80% of which yielded gold - more than $3 billion worth of gold was found there.

Discussion questions:

  • How worried do you think Mr. McEwan was the morning he pitched his idea to the board?
  • What was the risk he was taking?
  • Do you think Goldcorp's own team of geophysicists could have found the same amount of gold?

You can learn more about this example in this week's reading: Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration.

Connexions

Richard Baranuk is a professor of signal processing who teaches in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. Using the concept of mass collaboration, he is trying to change how textbooks are created. Check out his presentation at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference:

Also check out the site itself: Connexions

Discussion questions:

  • What are the benefits to traditional students?
  • To the traditional instructor?
  • Who else does Connexions want to benefit?
  • Do you think it will work?
  • What are some of the barriers to adoption?

The Concepts and Core Principles

The following four core principles are proposed in Wikinomics. They are borrowed here:

  • Openness
  • Peering and peer production
  • Sharing
  • Acting Globally

We'll talk about these in class.

The Enabling Technologies

Some examples of enabling technologies are:

References

If you use inline references, they will appear here. If you don't, this section can be removed.

  1. ↑ Tapscott, D. and A. Williams. (2006). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio Hardcover. Dec 2006. 320 pages.
  2. ↑ Wikipedia's description of itself, accessed on 2007-10-25.
  3. ↑ Tapscott, D. and A. Williams. (2006). Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration. Business Week Online. Accessed on Oct 25, 2007.
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