collaboration - Page number 23

Earlier this week I wrote a post about some of the cultural challenges Wikipedia is facing as its contribution rate has slowed. The comments you made were fantastic, including one by Dr. Ed H Chi (the PARC scientist who published the study I referred to in the post) linking to a prototype dashboard his team created to showcase who is editing each Wikipedia page (totally fascinating—you have to go try it!) » Read more

By Brian Gentile, Jaspersoft CEO

It occurred to me recently that the open source movement is really nothing less than a renaissance.  Perhaps that sounds grandiose, but stay with me.
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Traditional media companies are in big trouble. You may have noticed. You know who else has noticed? David Pakman, currently a partner at the prestigious Venrock venture capital firm. You may also know David as the former CEO of eMusic—a fairly disruptive media company in its own right. David has over 300,000 Twitter followers and regularly blogs here about the “undoing of big media.”
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If you've ever watched a road bike race like the Tour de France, you know the peloton is the big group of riders that cluster together during the race to reduce drag. It's a great example of collaboration in action. But let's face it: the people in the middle of the peloton may go faster than they would otherwise, but they don't win the race.

When it comes to creating and innovating, most companies (and employees) are in the peloton. They are doing enough to survive, but they are stuck in the pack. And if they stay in the pack too long, they lose. » Read more

In the discussions around some of my previous articles, I've noticed a trend: we seem to be focusing on cultural changes that need to be made for the open source way to be effective in contexts beyond technology. » Read more

It's a good bet that the next generation of defining companies will have corporate cultures built the open source way-- around openness and collaboration, while fostering community and culture that extend outside the company walls.

In fact many of the defining companies of the first decade of this century show these characteristics (with one very notable exception we discussed earlier).
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You have an open source project. You discover something that it would be really awesome to have added to your project, but you can't justify bumping it up the priority queue. It clearly has a bit of core CS theory in it, a bit of old-skool hacking, and the end product will add some real value to your project (and possibly the lives of thousands of people). How do you get a college student to take this on as an independent study project? » Read more

Before the January 12 earthquake, widely available maps of the country of Haiti had little more than a few highways and roads. The capital city of Port-au-Prince was a shaded outline that suggested a city. The problem was that Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, had been ignored by traditional commercial data providers. Few could afford a GPS, so why build digital maps of roads or buildings? » Read more

Interesting article in Forbes about the way Threadless, the awesome t-shirt company, thinks about community-building. For those of you who aren't familiar with Threadless, they do about $30 million in revenues with a unique cultural/business model that merges a community of t-shirt creators and consumers into one happy family (you can read more about them in the Forbes article). » Read more

What the heck is an innovation competition? Can we compete and collaborate at the same time? Could we solve world hunger through collaborative competition?

I quizzed Anil Rathi, CEO of Idea Crossing, a company that hosts innovation competitions on behalf of companies and organizations, on these questions and more. » Read more