Collaboration

During my recent vacation I read Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams. All about the transfer of power from institutions to distributed networks. The trend to distributed networks is very powerful as the ability to innovate, enhance, and share – the positive feelings/reputation enhancing/business development/economies of scale opportunities, and agility and responsiveness are all very compelling.

So I’ve been tracking the wikinomics website and am looking at the Wikinomics Playbook (a peer produced guide to collaboration in the 21st century. I’m interested in the value systems and generally accepted rule of behaviour that govern online collaboration. In the Tower of Google the statement is made that those who trust collaborate better… and trust is mostly a question of shared value systems.

Well, two apparently diametrically opposed thoughts come to mind:

• how can there be mass collaboration in a world of fragmented value systems?
• does mass collaboration mean there is a ‘global value system’ that distributed networking is tapping into?

Cause for some investigation I think.