HOW WEB 2.0 COMMUNITIES SOLVE THE KNOWLEDGE
SHARING PROBLEM
J.P. AllenUniversity of San Franciscoblog.jpedia.org
What’s significant about web 2.0?
Here Comes Everybody (Shirky, 2008) - collective action without organizations
The Wealth of Network (Benkler, 2006) - commons-based peer production
Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) - mass collaboration
Groundswe! (Li and Bernoff, 2008) - customers and social technologies
Original Web 2.0 definition (O’Reilly, 2005) - harnessing collective intelligence
knowledge sharingthe mass (re)production of knowledge
“a natural lab for open knowledge”
How the web has changed
Average web page has281 tags and 41 links (2006)
84% use scripts(average of 7 external scripts - 64k of code)
dynamic pages
(websiteoptimization.com, 2008)
Web 2.0 adds open interfaces and open execution on top of the open hypertext of Web 1.0
The knowledge sharing problemBased on a not-so-useful theory of knowledge reproduction
Knowledge management - why should I share? (e.g., Wasko and Faraj, 2005)
Tacit Explicit
Classification and preparation work (e.g., Markus, 2001)
Knowledge reproduction
(Foray, 2004)
Knowledge sharing cases
facebook (6m groups, 14m photos/day, 150k 3rd party apps)
plentyoffish (1 employee, 120 volunteers scan 100k photos each/year, matching algorithm)
digg (4k stories submitted/month, front page algorithm)
craigslist (30m classifieds/month, 10m photos/month, 75m forum posts)
yelp (1m reviews, first review - sponsorship program, elite reviewers)
wikipedia (10m articles, 203m user edits, 15% talk pages)
wordpress (2.8m blogs, theme/plugin community, full open source)
prosper (4k lender groups, average loan $6k)
linkedin (0.5m C-level members, 5m members with <5 connections, q&a)
tripadvisor (10m reviews, multiple dimensions)
Knowledge sharing: Socio-technical practice
Profiles
Groups
Connections
Categories
Commentary
Ratings
Knowledge sharing: Successive modeling
Contribution-based search
Contribution-based comparison
Contribution-based updates
Contribution-based communications
Automatic connections
Additional software
Future knowledge sharing destinations
Enterprise 2.0
The ‘Business Commons’: competing on top of shared business knowledge
“There is no substitute for hard work.”
“There is no substitute for knowledge.”
- Thomas A. Edison
- W. Edwards Deming