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