"The beauty of wikis is collaboration. It will be interesting to see if collaborative efforts can provide useful information concerning the 2008 Presidential Election".
_ - Alan, wikinomics playbook contributor_
Marshall McLuhan suggested that we should consider the message that a medium conveys. In Wikinomics we were introduced to this paradigm that wikis convey openness. What else do they convey? What can a wiki evolve to or help evolve, shift, change?
"collaboration platforms can reveal processes like nothing else we've ever seen. If we want to - all the backrooms can become public venues. Can the transparency we gain from that help us achieve the understanding and trust we need to help us solve civic and global problems?"
Do we have leaders that are ready to step into this new opportunity - or will they shun the intrusion of new participants and observers in decisionmaking. In Wikinomics Beyond Business, our community members look into different areas of culture and society and find ripe opportunities for transformation - and also some formidable barriers to change.
The traditional systems are being overwhelmed by complex problems.
All the big issues of the 21st century keep pointing to one few fact of life - we are all inter-connected, that our decisions have wide ranging consequences, and some we can't yet even imagine. We have the internet as the fundamental experssion of inter-connectedness, yet, civic engagement in public affairs, and involvement in community activities is perhaps worse today than before the invention of the lightbulb. Options for change are dramatically increasing - dissatisfaction with the current "system" is increasing - are we approaching a tipping point?
The threats we face in the opening years of the 21st century - climate change, resource shortages, political extremism, ecological collapse, are effecting every living system on the planet. The problems transcend boundaries and cultures, are intergenerational in scope and more complex than anything we have heretofore faced. As Thomas Homer Dixon has suggested, these problems are literally outstripping the capacity of our current systems to generate the decisions we need in order to solve them. We need more collaboration, more trust and more progress in overcoming these challenges. Can mass collaboration provide the framework for a solution?
If the status quo is broken, what do we replace it with?
Maybe harnessing new and emerging communication technologies can re-engage citizens. Perhaps, we can find ways of engaging minds all across the planet from every culture - on wikis and blogs and podcasts and mashups and self-produced videos - can harness and channel the multiplicity of perspectives we will need to understand and begin solving these planetary, intergenerational, seemingly intractable problems before they become truly unsolveable.
A new lingua franca?
Collaboration requires that the collaborators share language and a common vocabulary. As a common vocabulary becomes ever more useful, controlling its definitions and introducing new terms for mass acceptance will become ever more important. Competitive advantage may well lie in controlling the development of the structure of communication itself.
Starting Locally
- The social fabric of a town or neighborhood can be woven tighter with weapons of mass collaboration. Community media/citizen journalism websites feature citizen-created content (text, photos, video, audio) and citizen-initiated/moderated online discussions. Placeblogger tracks these sites.
- Ongoing community charettes could be facilitated with transparent and widespread community engagement in the civic planning process. Individual citizens would be empowered to co-create a vision for, say, a new waterfront plan, in a way currently only available to corporate interests.
- For example, in Minnesota, citizens have created and Locally Grown, as well as a local civic blogosphere comprised of citizen, organization, business, and leadership blogs.
Really, Really locally
- A wiki could be used by a family and relatives to document geneological data and memories of various members of the family, a family treasury of reveries.
- Wiki (Google type) Social Calendars can be used to share and update Family / Friends Calendar information with weekly activities, appointments, events, etc updated by Family /Friends Calendar members.
- Collaborative planning tools for social events, family gatherings, can easily be shared and updated with a Wiki Document / Spreadsheet.
- Cooking Recipes such as grilled shrimp can be published on static websites or shared with variations of recipes updated on a Wiki document.
A wiki is very important for the future of governments because governments can use it to get the private sector involved in policy making
Collaboration and conflict resolution
If a principal of presentation training and the root of conflict lies in a sense of "separateness" in the sense that we do not see others as being the same as us or as profoundly different than us, perhaps one source of conflict resolution can be found in the principles of wikinomics.
If the transparency and openness of wikinomics can facilitate inter-company, intra-company and public collaboration, could it be used to resolve conflict? If we can use collaborative processes to co-create a strategic vision for an organization, can we use it to co-create a vision of mutual prosperity?
If wikinomics enables engineering and marketing to communicate product requirements, can it also be used to help Palestinian children and Israeli children document their daily lives and share their "art", resulting in greater understanding, empathy and connectedness? Could conflict resolution - perhaps decades from now - be found in the shared stories of children?
Topics in this section:
Meta: These pages are for studying collaboration in non-economic situations, and can include some analysis and futurecasting of social institutions.
Collaborative Health Care
Beyond the Classroom
Portable gps systems
Wikis and Politics
Collaboration for Culture
Religion in the Age of Mass Collaboration
Development 2.0: collaboration in the development sector
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