The Web Economy/23

Collaborative Community
This is a lesson part of the module The Web Economy out of the Open Source ERP/Executive Masters course conducted by a private university.

Topics

 * The Web allows virtual community to form across borders. The smartest person can be in the same room. Much ineffiency of meetings are dispensed with.
 * Forums and trackers in mailing lists can track down activity efficiently saving time and magnify activity that was never possible.
 * Small teams and little steps could overcome large established products.
 * The Long Tail has no overhead in the era of wikinomics.

Assignment Tasks

 * What must a community possess in order to thrive? Compare the example of Nupedia and Wikipedia.
 * How can individuals benefit from joining such a community?
 * How can you become more better off working in a community or outside it?

Activities

 * Publish your works in an attractive manner in your user page, stating your own views and findings providing links to your sources. Use the talk page here to score marks.
 * Create or edit sub-pages of course materials within wikiversity.
 * Discuss in the forum (link shall be provided) by offering your ideas and answering or comment on others' postings.

Introduction

 * The web has been evolving so fast particularly in social engineering support such as inter-relay chatroom (irc), threaded buletin boards, email feeds and SourceForge tools for globally connected code exchanges, that real software improvement can just happen overnight.Wikipedia having grown out of pure cyberspace has waited to happen and such things are now inevitable.

When There Are No Borders

 * What the web really did is to remove the walls that stand in between all the human creativity and energy that can synergise into many wonderful projects.

Story of Nupedia

 * Wikipedia was an offshoot of Nupedia which was strict and disallow unqualified entries. In the end Nupedia died and Wikipedia exploded into millions of articles and dozens of languages with over a hundred thousand volunteers.

Getting The Smartest Person

 * As the smartest person is not in this room, s/he must be in some other room in another place perhaps thousands of miles away. With web marvelous connectivity and chatroom or forums, that someone can locate the community and barter some ideas and put down into codes, all within minutes rather than weeks.

Magic of SourceForge

 * Perhaps the greatest gift the web has offered is from SourceForge which has free tools such as SVN (sub-version to synchronise every developer’s code into a single repository) and trackers to keep track of bugs and feature requests with automatic sequential ID numberings.

Mob Poltiics

 * It is now quite proven that without centralised control and leaving to the freedom of the masses more good will result from it. This has been given many names such as ‘barefoot community’, ‘Smart Mobs’, ‘Pro-Am’ or professional amateurs, It has now evolved into a new science called ‘Wikinomics’.

The Missing Leader

 * From my experience in the ADempiere project, I felt like a missing leader. Even if I am not there, things go along rigorously. This is because there is no control or restriction for anyone to join.

Like Wikipedia, any vandalism can be reverted with a single click, decisions made in small pockets but openly for all to review, so I am not needed most of the time. Many volunteers help in managing and sharing the burden.


 * The members from all over the globe allow a 24 X 7 existence of the project. Multiple companies of developers could commit codes during their waking hours without needing to have the attendance of other team members. When they sleep, another side wakes up to examine the commits and repair or continue the work.


 * Teams and individuals work on their own paths and so we find some codes been neglected and some been intensively attended to. The nett effect is like a beehive of non-stop activity. Thus even if there is a leader, he will not be able to sleep. In a way, the self managing of it all is good as there is no extra administration that has to be paid to get things done.

Project Of None

 * With zero employee but all volunteers, the project will thus be perpetual and not be constrained by bills to pay and commercial threats or economic downturn that others are suffering now. There were fierce flames and debates but somehow they learnt to work better together. It’s a living miracle.

Links to Student Notes
(Provided by Students - subject to edit ranking by tutor)

Notable Links to Resources
(Provided by Students - subject to edit ranking by tutor)

Sub-Pages
(Done in wikiversity as course material by the students under the guidance of the tutor)

Course Navigation
Next - Seeking a Niche >> The Web Economy/24