Having finished reading Wikinomics I can definitely understand why the book sells - it pleases all parties of the food chain from big corporations looking out for cheaper R&D to independent thinkers in search of fame.
For me it was so inspirational that I already wrote a post on some aspects of the book: Crowdsourcing is like group sex – somebody does all the work and everybody gets the credit that covers pretty much my opinion on the collaboration side of the book.
In no way does it mean that I do not value collaboration or teamwork software. During the past 4 years of my work-life, Lotus Domino Smiley was my constant companion and a very useful platform to keep updated data on customers, servers, events etc. The important feature that made the collaboration tool work was appointed personal responsibility- each server and topic had an appointed person responsible for updating and reviewing the posts on it and in my opinion that single feature made the source viable as there was a number of alternate info sources on the same topics on stick its, memos and spreadsheets on my office desk with similar information but only the online source was validated.
Wikipedia as a source on the other hand serves a totally different but similarly important task for me as well. It represents the restroom wall with all its vices and virtues. There is no better source for the current community opinion on the topic at hand and it is usually due to change pretty fast when the circumstances change. So that one may even think that the job, which Orwell’s 1984 protagonists held, really does exist in our world.
For scientific facts I prefer scientific source e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica
For me it was so inspirational that I already wrote a post on some aspects of the book: Crowdsourcing is like group sex – somebody does all the work and everybody gets the credit that covers pretty much my opinion on the collaboration side of the book.
In no way does it mean that I do not value collaboration or teamwork software. During the past 4 years of my work-life, Lotus Domino Smiley was my constant companion and a very useful platform to keep updated data on customers, servers, events etc. The important feature that made the collaboration tool work was appointed personal responsibility- each server and topic had an appointed person responsible for updating and reviewing the posts on it and in my opinion that single feature made the source viable as there was a number of alternate info sources on the same topics on stick its, memos and spreadsheets on my office desk with similar information but only the online source was validated.
Wikipedia as a source on the other hand serves a totally different but similarly important task for me as well. It represents the restroom wall with all its vices and virtues. There is no better source for the current community opinion on the topic at hand and it is usually due to change pretty fast when the circumstances change. So that one may even think that the job, which Orwell’s 1984 protagonists held, really does exist in our world.
For scientific facts I prefer scientific source e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica
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