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Book review. Wikinomics: How Mass CollaborationChanges Everything

This is a great book for non-profit leadership to sink their teeth into.  It's both hi-level and granuar in scope, providing you with content to start a creative fire within your organization to anaylze/implement/adapt a new tool for collaborative endeavors as well as give you prolific, quality examples of how other organizations have increased mutliple capacities by leveraging wiki into their bucket o' resources.

 

Wikinomics, co-authored by Don Tapscottand Anthony D. Williams, takes a highly enthusiastic view of what wikis have done and could potentially do for any organization and/or collaborartive endeavor.  As a communicaitons practicioner, I'd highly recommend you gauge your own enthusiasm realistically - wikis can be great tools, but they don't fit ever gap for your communications needs.

 The authors begin with describing what wikinomics means to them - a new economic landscape generated from the very presence of wiki tools.  Essentially, due to the amazing empowerment of wikis for allowing a global input from a variety of cultural viewpoints, knowledge generation is much more encompassing, more efficient and a whole lot faster.  Add competition of marketplaces to that brew and you've got a new economic force that must be recognized and dealt with.  

With colorful chapter titles such as Ideagoras, The New Alexandrians, The Global Plant Floor and The Peer Pioneers, the authors deftly tap multiple value points for implementing the wiki tool.  

In Peer Pioneers, they discuss the capacity of wikis to empower a global community of any professional field to collaborate remotely on knowledge generation, documentation and updating.  Their examples point to the proven influence of wiki usages such as Wikipedia.org, IBM's open source experiment, Innocentive, The Human Genome Project, and copious others.  The examples of how Research and Development for new projects is becoming much more cost effective and fluid to project manage is quite perceptive and inspiring.  

What is most important for non-profits to take away from this?  I'd recommend keying in to the chapters The Perfect Storm and Platforms for Participation.  In The Perfect Storm you'll receive a great education about what contexts wikis can work in for enhancing the productivity of collaborative efforts.  If you have teams working on multiple projects (which you most likely do) wouldn't it be sweet to have on central repository for design, editing, tracking, and ultimately documenting the entire process (even all the way thru release and beta enhancement) so that you have one central library to refer to for any number of reasons?  Yes, it would be sweet.  And this chapter will give you a firm footing for seeing how that can happen.

 

As well, Platforms for Participation discusses how innovation is given digital-steroids via the way that wiki tools scale and scope exponentially for communities of users to easily participate.  I definitely see massive potential for non-profits to leverage the wiki platform to not only streamline and enhance many internal documentation and communication processes, but, just as important, to interact with the communities you service.  This chapter will breathe creative and practical advice into your thought processes for engaging all platform selection issues and inform you with new techniques.

   

Check out the webiste community created around the books affects and its enhancement for future editions at wikinomics.com/book/

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