Wikinomics in brief
In October last year, an article appeared on Habré about the book by Don Tapscott Wikinomics. How massive collaboration changes everything .
It so happened that in the course of writing my coursework (and I get an economics education) I had to read this book and, by and large, I liked the many examples given by the author in it. In this post I will briefly go over them, but at the same time I will not focus on the positive or negative sides of the peer-to-peer production as compared to the traditional one, since this is the topic of my subsequent coursework and I haven’t analyzed it deeply yet.
In short, the book describes how attracting people to cooperate voluntarily on a network can lead to the creation of products that are similar or even superior to those created by commercial companies. Very much in the book is written about Linux and Wikipedia.
I will start this post with the definition
Peer-to - peer production is a way of producing goods and services based on self-organizing communities, whose members, on the basis of voluntary cooperation, come together to achieve certain goals.
Most often, the creation of a product within such a system is not the main place of work of a person. Not only does he do this in his spare time, he also does not receive money for it (again, most often). The proliferation of the Internet and the transition to Web2.0 allowed millions of strangers to freely interact with each other. So there were such projects as MySpace, Linux, Wikipedia, YouTube and many, many others. A special position here is occupied by blogs that only collect an unimaginable number of readers: for example, Twitter Ashton Kutcher today has 4,846,640 followers.
Thus, it is obvious that many network projects are able to attract huge masses of people in a very short time. The same Hugo Chavez, who gathered more than 120 thousand followers for the first day on Twitter.
')
As part of the Olson Laboratory, there is a group of researchers studying the human genome. For their purposes, they use a super computer. But this is no ordinary computer. This is part of the FightAIDS @ home project, under which anyone can provide free computing power of their computer to the laboratory. Russian version of the site
Here are examples of active participation innumerable. The same posting on Habr and even adding a comment is also an example of active participation.
Perhaps the most striking example of active participation can be considered posting an article on Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself does not belong to anyone, it is serviced by a staff of 5 people and moderated exclusively by volunteers. Some statistics (for April 8 of this year):
But do not think that peer-to-peer production is possible only in the IT field. So, many companies, including Boeing, Dow, DuPoint, Procter & Gamble, Novartis, offer everyone to help them. To this end, the company publishes a list of issues on the Innocentive.com website that they cannot or do not want to solve by themselves. For example:
For the best solution, you can get from 1.5 to an unlimited number of kilo dollars.
InnoCentive is not the only such site. Similar services are provided by Nine-Sigma, Innovation Rely Centers, Innovation Xchange Network, YourEncore, Eureka Medical. Among them I would like to mention YourEncore, which hires retired scientists who are looking for things to do in their free time.
If you organize the process of finding solutions correctly, it is possible even cross-exchange between different industries. For example, it was found that the material used to manufacture diapers can be useful when laying trans-Atlantic telecommunication cables. The manufacturer of diapers transfers a license to the cable manufacturer, receiving deductions for it, and he in turn receives a useful technology.
For such an exchange of ideas, the yet2.com virtual market was created: companies can put up their little-used assets for sale. Entering the site, firms can access a list of technologies worth 10 billion dollars. The network of this resource, consists of five hundred companies and about 100 thousand people and allows you to access about 40 percent of the global research work. The founder of the project, Phil Stern, believes that 80-90 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list have dedicated employees posting and searching for information about new technologies.
However, companies should not think that in order to successfully use the services of such volunteers, they should open all their cards. Far from it. They should lay out the data that are strategically necessary for research, but do not harm competitive advantages. Again an example:
Since 1991, about a dozen pharmaceutical companies, including such giants as Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline, have abandoned their own patented developments, which gave them patent income in favor of open communities, such as the SNP Consortium and Alliance Signaling . These two projects are aimed at collecting genetic data collected from various biological and medical research in publicly available databases. These communities are advancing medicine to a new phase of “genetic medicine,” which will cure diseases at the level of human chromosomes. This scheme has already proven that early research and clinical trials are more effective in small companies.
In general, the policy of providing data is not aimed at saving on costs, but at accelerating innovations and their implementation.
The Internet has allowed people to unite in communities, it is. Currently, landline telephony is almost a thing of the past. And from the point of view of international contacts - and mobile. Skype Internet telephony programs are replacing
According to Skype CEO Niklas Zenstrom, the idea of charging for telephone calls belongs to the past century.
Facebook, Flickr and other projects are already well-established and dynamically developing projects. In fact, users are provided with only the framework of the site, and the photos, comments, articles and everything else is provided by the participants themselves. Recently, almost all such sites are equipped with the possibility of tagging. By tags you can search for people with similar thoughts and interests that may be interesting for companies. The tag, in essence, is a voice in favor of a particular phenomenon. It is possible that search engines will soon appear for searching by tags (or maybe already?)
An interesting phenomenon was the combination of several unrelated projects into one. Example:
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina passed through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Hundreds of thousands of victims were left without shelter and livelihoods. Moreover, they did not have the opportunity to contact their relatives and friends to make sure that they are all right. The ineffective actions of the authorities failed to significantly improve the situation of the victims of the hurricane, and in this chaos a project was born, led by a group of enthusiasts, who in its effectiveness surpassed all centralized government measures.
The basis of this project was a list of survivors called Katrinalist. The hastily created site collected information about all the saved people, and the search system helped to easily find the right person. No state permits were issued for this project, special responsible bodies were not formed, no funds were allocated from the budget: a group of people under the guidance of enthusiasts used elementary network technologies to help those in need.
By the evening of the same day, more than 50 thousand records were processed, and grew noticeably, eventually reaching 650 thousand. At the same time, people who were searching could enter their first name, last name, address, and other data in a search query on the Katrinalist website to get a list of people matching the request.
After some time, two designers from Utah launched the Katrina Housing project, based on Google Maps, which allows to establish a connection between people left homeless and those who could shelter them. Thanks to this service, about 5 thousand people were able to find a temporary shelter.
For those who did not have the Internet at hand, and many had such a problem, different companies and volunteers created wireless networks, installed computers in shelters and distributed telephones with access to the network to the victims.
Such a program would take more than a year from the government and would require a huge amount of money. And thanks to the actions of volunteers, this whole action program was implemented in 4 days without investing public money.
In general, Google Maps is very popular for combining with other sources of information. Examples:
Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, first started creating an encyclopedia in 1998, creating the Nupedia project. Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was a top-down centralized hierarchy: paid teachers and specialists in specific areas conducted a process of studying and approving content, which consisted of seven stages. After a year of work and 120 thousand dollars invested in the project, only 24 articles were published. Wales decides to close the project.
After that, he organized the site again, but on a more open basis - so that each visitor could make their own changes or additions. During the first month of work two hundred articles were published, and according to the results of the first year of work more than 18 thousand.
Jimmy Wales doesn’t think much about why people voluntarily agree to support and develop this project: “Why do people play football? It's just interesting, and this is a social activity. ”
Everyone understands that Wikipedia is not perfect. Although the user community monitors the quality, it is physically impossible to completely remove all the flaws. So, in May 2005, an anonymous user posted a completely fictional article about former USA Today editor John Saynentaler , which pointed to the involvement of this man in the murder of John F. Kennedy. For the next four months, anyone looking for information on Sigenagener on Wikipedia came across this false information.
At the same time, the situation regarding the comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica in terms of the amount of inaccuracies is not always based on real facts. So, a study conducted by the journal Nature showed that for 4 inaccuracies in Wikipedia there are 3 inaccuracies in Britannic. Britannica said that inaccuracies on Wikipedia are more serious. It is also true that Wikipedia fairly accurately reflects scientific issues for which there are documented facts, but at the same time it fails to provide objective assessments of political and historical facts, where the ideologies and various views of the authors influence the quality of the article. But Britannik overlooks the most important thing - inaccuracies in Wikipedia are corrected almost immediately, but remain in Britannic. According to the research of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an error that was accidentally entered into an article is corrected on average in 1.7 minutes.
One of the earliest and still most active communities of this type are Lego designer fans. This company is known to many as a manufacturer of multi-colored plastic cubes, but its range also includes high-tech toys for adults. For example, using the Lego Mindstorms kit, created in 1998, you can create a robot, car, etc. based on programmable parts.
Three weeks after the release of the kit for sale, communities appeared that offered solutions for reprogramming parts, motors and sensors. When such decisions began to come to the company, Lego began to think about bringing lawsuits against burglars. When users rebelled, the company still accepted these ideas and even added a clause on “hacking right” to the license agreement. Today, the website offers users a free program for programming details, and users post on their forum schemes of their inventions with detailed instructions. Thus, thanks to the combination of Lego Factory Mindstorms and the community of prosumers, the company was able to significantly advance and still offers many innovations. Now there is a service for a regular designer: with the help of a free 3D modeling program, you can create your own set of designer and then order it online. At the same time, visitors will be able to see what has already been ordered before them. However, it is worth noting that not all companies have taken the path of Lego, opening up access to expand the capabilities of the product.
So, Apple, whose iPod media player is one of the most popular in the world, keeps this platform completely closed and does not allow making any modifications: there are no software tools or instructions. However, this situation today is no longer satisfied with consumers. On various forums you can see hundreds of programs for hacking iPod. The most famous of them is the program Podzilla, developed by a programmer from Frankfurt. In essence, this is a Linux-based graphical system running on a small iPod screen. The process of creating this modification took 4 months and consisted of line-by-line analysis of the software code iPod. Podzilla has expanded the capabilities of the player, allowing you to view images, play games, use high-quality sound recording, use Google Maps and more. It is noteworthy that Apple does not comment on such hacks. The same with the PSP hacks.
In general, anyone who liked, you can read. True, it was written somehow stupidly (my opinion is subjective). Somehow the information on the book is too smeared. But it is worth reading. Thanks for attention
It so happened that in the course of writing my coursework (and I get an economics education) I had to read this book and, by and large, I liked the many examples given by the author in it. In this post I will briefly go over them, but at the same time I will not focus on the positive or negative sides of the peer-to-peer production as compared to the traditional one, since this is the topic of my subsequent coursework and I haven’t analyzed it deeply yet.
In short, the book describes how attracting people to cooperate voluntarily on a network can lead to the creation of products that are similar or even superior to those created by commercial companies. Very much in the book is written about Linux and Wikipedia.
Introduction
I will start this post with the definition
Peer-to - peer production is a way of producing goods and services based on self-organizing communities, whose members, on the basis of voluntary cooperation, come together to achieve certain goals.
Most often, the creation of a product within such a system is not the main place of work of a person. Not only does he do this in his spare time, he also does not receive money for it (again, most often). The proliferation of the Internet and the transition to Web2.0 allowed millions of strangers to freely interact with each other. So there were such projects as MySpace, Linux, Wikipedia, YouTube and many, many others. A special position here is occupied by blogs that only collect an unimaginable number of readers: for example, Twitter Ashton Kutcher today has 4,846,640 followers.
Thus, it is obvious that many network projects are able to attract huge masses of people in a very short time. The same Hugo Chavez, who gathered more than 120 thousand followers for the first day on Twitter.
')
Passive participation in peer-to-peer production
As part of the Olson Laboratory, there is a group of researchers studying the human genome. For their purposes, they use a super computer. But this is no ordinary computer. This is part of the FightAIDS @ home project, under which anyone can provide free computing power of their computer to the laboratory. Russian version of the site
Active participation
Here are examples of active participation innumerable. The same posting on Habr and even adding a comment is also an example of active participation.
Perhaps the most striking example of active participation can be considered posting an article on Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself does not belong to anyone, it is serviced by a staff of 5 people and moderated exclusively by volunteers. Some statistics (for April 8 of this year):
- Total articles - 15 395 385
- Number of pages - 57,081,416
- Number of corrections - 886,549,837
- Administration - 4 688
- The number of users - 22 955 207
- The number of images - 1 871 638
But do not think that peer-to-peer production is possible only in the IT field. So, many companies, including Boeing, Dow, DuPoint, Procter & Gamble, Novartis, offer everyone to help them. To this end, the company publishes a list of issues on the Innocentive.com website that they cannot or do not want to solve by themselves. For example:
For the best solution, you can get from 1.5 to an unlimited number of kilo dollars.
InnoCentive is not the only such site. Similar services are provided by Nine-Sigma, Innovation Rely Centers, Innovation Xchange Network, YourEncore, Eureka Medical. Among them I would like to mention YourEncore, which hires retired scientists who are looking for things to do in their free time.
If you organize the process of finding solutions correctly, it is possible even cross-exchange between different industries. For example, it was found that the material used to manufacture diapers can be useful when laying trans-Atlantic telecommunication cables. The manufacturer of diapers transfers a license to the cable manufacturer, receiving deductions for it, and he in turn receives a useful technology.
For such an exchange of ideas, the yet2.com virtual market was created: companies can put up their little-used assets for sale. Entering the site, firms can access a list of technologies worth 10 billion dollars. The network of this resource, consists of five hundred companies and about 100 thousand people and allows you to access about 40 percent of the global research work. The founder of the project, Phil Stern, believes that 80-90 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list have dedicated employees posting and searching for information about new technologies.
Providing data
However, companies should not think that in order to successfully use the services of such volunteers, they should open all their cards. Far from it. They should lay out the data that are strategically necessary for research, but do not harm competitive advantages. Again an example:
Since 1991, about a dozen pharmaceutical companies, including such giants as Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline, have abandoned their own patented developments, which gave them patent income in favor of open communities, such as the SNP Consortium and Alliance Signaling . These two projects are aimed at collecting genetic data collected from various biological and medical research in publicly available databases. These communities are advancing medicine to a new phase of “genetic medicine,” which will cure diseases at the level of human chromosomes. This scheme has already proven that early research and clinical trials are more effective in small companies.
In general, the policy of providing data is not aimed at saving on costs, but at accelerating innovations and their implementation.
Connection
The Internet has allowed people to unite in communities, it is. Currently, landline telephony is almost a thing of the past. And from the point of view of international contacts - and mobile. Skype Internet telephony programs are replacing
According to Skype CEO Niklas Zenstrom, the idea of charging for telephone calls belongs to the past century.
Social networks and tags
Facebook, Flickr and other projects are already well-established and dynamically developing projects. In fact, users are provided with only the framework of the site, and the photos, comments, articles and everything else is provided by the participants themselves. Recently, almost all such sites are equipped with the possibility of tagging. By tags you can search for people with similar thoughts and interests that may be interesting for companies. The tag, in essence, is a voice in favor of a particular phenomenon. It is possible that search engines will soon appear for searching by tags (or maybe already?)
Sudden discoveries
An interesting phenomenon was the combination of several unrelated projects into one. Example:
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina passed through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Hundreds of thousands of victims were left without shelter and livelihoods. Moreover, they did not have the opportunity to contact their relatives and friends to make sure that they are all right. The ineffective actions of the authorities failed to significantly improve the situation of the victims of the hurricane, and in this chaos a project was born, led by a group of enthusiasts, who in its effectiveness surpassed all centralized government measures.
The basis of this project was a list of survivors called Katrinalist. The hastily created site collected information about all the saved people, and the search system helped to easily find the right person. No state permits were issued for this project, special responsible bodies were not formed, no funds were allocated from the budget: a group of people under the guidance of enthusiasts used elementary network technologies to help those in need.
By the evening of the same day, more than 50 thousand records were processed, and grew noticeably, eventually reaching 650 thousand. At the same time, people who were searching could enter their first name, last name, address, and other data in a search query on the Katrinalist website to get a list of people matching the request.
After some time, two designers from Utah launched the Katrina Housing project, based on Google Maps, which allows to establish a connection between people left homeless and those who could shelter them. Thanks to this service, about 5 thousand people were able to find a temporary shelter.
For those who did not have the Internet at hand, and many had such a problem, different companies and volunteers created wireless networks, installed computers in shelters and distributed telephones with access to the network to the victims.
Such a program would take more than a year from the government and would require a huge amount of money. And thanks to the actions of volunteers, this whole action program was implemented in 4 days without investing public money.
In general, Google Maps is very popular for combining with other sources of information. Examples:
- CheapGas - a service that allows you to find a gas station with the lowest prices ( example );
- HousingMaps, combining real estate website and Google map data ( example );
- ChicagoCrime, providing a map of criminal activities in Chicago and many others ( example ).
Wikipedia
Make love not holywar please
Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, first started creating an encyclopedia in 1998, creating the Nupedia project. Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was a top-down centralized hierarchy: paid teachers and specialists in specific areas conducted a process of studying and approving content, which consisted of seven stages. After a year of work and 120 thousand dollars invested in the project, only 24 articles were published. Wales decides to close the project.
After that, he organized the site again, but on a more open basis - so that each visitor could make their own changes or additions. During the first month of work two hundred articles were published, and according to the results of the first year of work more than 18 thousand.
Jimmy Wales doesn’t think much about why people voluntarily agree to support and develop this project: “Why do people play football? It's just interesting, and this is a social activity. ”
Everyone understands that Wikipedia is not perfect. Although the user community monitors the quality, it is physically impossible to completely remove all the flaws. So, in May 2005, an anonymous user posted a completely fictional article about former USA Today editor John Saynentaler , which pointed to the involvement of this man in the murder of John F. Kennedy. For the next four months, anyone looking for information on Sigenagener on Wikipedia came across this false information.
At the same time, the situation regarding the comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica in terms of the amount of inaccuracies is not always based on real facts. So, a study conducted by the journal Nature showed that for 4 inaccuracies in Wikipedia there are 3 inaccuracies in Britannic. Britannica said that inaccuracies on Wikipedia are more serious. It is also true that Wikipedia fairly accurately reflects scientific issues for which there are documented facts, but at the same time it fails to provide objective assessments of political and historical facts, where the ideologies and various views of the authors influence the quality of the article. But Britannik overlooks the most important thing - inaccuracies in Wikipedia are corrected almost immediately, but remain in Britannic. According to the research of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an error that was accidentally entered into an article is corrected on average in 1.7 minutes.
Promery and DIY
One of the earliest and still most active communities of this type are Lego designer fans. This company is known to many as a manufacturer of multi-colored plastic cubes, but its range also includes high-tech toys for adults. For example, using the Lego Mindstorms kit, created in 1998, you can create a robot, car, etc. based on programmable parts.
Three weeks after the release of the kit for sale, communities appeared that offered solutions for reprogramming parts, motors and sensors. When such decisions began to come to the company, Lego began to think about bringing lawsuits against burglars. When users rebelled, the company still accepted these ideas and even added a clause on “hacking right” to the license agreement. Today, the website offers users a free program for programming details, and users post on their forum schemes of their inventions with detailed instructions. Thus, thanks to the combination of Lego Factory Mindstorms and the community of prosumers, the company was able to significantly advance and still offers many innovations. Now there is a service for a regular designer: with the help of a free 3D modeling program, you can create your own set of designer and then order it online. At the same time, visitors will be able to see what has already been ordered before them. However, it is worth noting that not all companies have taken the path of Lego, opening up access to expand the capabilities of the product.
So, Apple, whose iPod media player is one of the most popular in the world, keeps this platform completely closed and does not allow making any modifications: there are no software tools or instructions. However, this situation today is no longer satisfied with consumers. On various forums you can see hundreds of programs for hacking iPod. The most famous of them is the program Podzilla, developed by a programmer from Frankfurt. In essence, this is a Linux-based graphical system running on a small iPod screen. The process of creating this modification took 4 months and consisted of line-by-line analysis of the software code iPod. Podzilla has expanded the capabilities of the player, allowing you to view images, play games, use high-quality sound recording, use Google Maps and more. It is noteworthy that Apple does not comment on such hacks. The same with the PSP hacks.
In general, anyone who liked, you can read. True, it was written somehow stupidly (my opinion is subjective). Somehow the information on the book is too smeared. But it is worth reading. Thanks for attention
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/92766/
All Articles