Collaborative production of knowledge

The collaborative production of knowledge is the simultaneous action of many people who try to combine their ideas to make a new one. In fact “collaborative” is the process where two or more people work together toward a common goal and they don’t required leadership. An easy example may be a group of students that work together to make an essay. Instead, “knowledge” is everything that one people has acquired through experience or education. How to use a mobile phone or what study at school or the personal life is knowledge.

What is it happened?

In the last few years, the traditional collaboration of some individuals in meeting rooms or in conference has been passed by the global collaboration where “Traditional collaboration” may be represented by people sitting on a round table speaking (for example) about how to invent a new clean energy, and “Global collaboration” may be represented by people sitting in front of their computers who are speaking about the same argument through a webcam and who live in different countries

In the past…

In the past everything new was registered under the copyright mark. If someone needed to use it, they should have to pay to see and use it. This was an important limit for the world innovation. Also, the access to knowledge was very: if someone had need of information, he would have gone to a library or bought newspapers or watched TV. But the most important difference is that information was only unidirectional. An example of “unidirectional information” is TV because many people can watch it but nobody can replay or ask something and the information is only one-way: from TV to audiences. This is an important problem because only few people can participate and control news and information sources.

This is the future

The Internet has changed people life. Now the knowledge is everywhere, is free and everyone can create something new and immediately release it for free to the web population of the entire world. Now the information may also be bidirectional. If you go to the web site of the CNN for watching a video about the principal facts of the day, if you don’t understand something there is the email for asking clarifications and there is also a blog where you can put your opinion.Another fundamental difference from the past is that today masses of people can participate in economy like never before only connecting their computer to the internet: with the collaboration of the other person we can create encyclopaedias (I.E.Wikipedia), operating systems (I.E.Linux), books and many others intellectual products. Another very important idea is that in the past only the big companies were able to have a research and development sector because it was too expensive. Now also little and medium industries may solve their problems or their development ideas releasing them on the internet and asking the internet population to find a solution (I.E. BMW Developing Sector).

Collegamenti esterni

Wikinomics Progect [http://www.wikinomics.com/]