The J.P. Allen Blog

How web 2.0 solves the knowledge sharing problem

What really impresses me about the big Web 2.0 sites is how they use familiar metaphors in new ways. By starting from what we already know (such as profiles, groups, ratings, and ‘friends’), people naturally understand why it might be useful, fun, and easy to add their own online contributions. Kind of like how the blog metaphor liberated personal websites from the more difficult and foreign notion of the ‘home page’.

I’ve written a short exploratory paper on the contrast between the ‘abundance’ of knowledge sharing in Web 2.0 communities, and the ’scarcity’ of knowledge sharing that is predicted by much of the academic literature. The academic research, mostly done inside organizations, usually finds that people are really, really reluctant to share any knowledge online–what’s in it for me, they ask? So they see it as a ‘public goods’ problem. According to this thinking, there’s no reason to share valuable knowledge when you can ‘free-ride’ off the contributions of others. People have to be rewarded, or else they won’t share.

Web 2.0 communities don’t have that problem–people share, a lot! So it’s time to change the knowledge sharing problem from ‘how to bribe people’ to ‘how to turn all this peer-based sharing into useful knowledge’.

(As an aside, I think this is one reason why wikis are still challenging–there are plenty of empty wikis out there. Our ’shared document’ and ‘version control’ metaphors aren’t nearly as widespread, or as well-developed, as simple metaphors like comments or ratings.)

A version of this paper will be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS-08) in June.

USF innovation award for wikis, open source, podcasting

The CIT (Center for Instructional Technology) Innovation Award celebrates the “excellent use of technology in education” at USF.  One of the 2007 awards honored the use of wikis, open source, and podcasting at the business school. The India tour wiki and the MBA podcast series were singled out for special praise.

The 2007 CIT Innovation Awards.

Thanks to all the hard-working USF students who made this possible. I wish I could share the award check with each and every one of you!

New paper on Web 2.0, wikipedia, and social informatics

A draft version of a new position paper, “Web 2.0: A social informatics perspective“, is now available online. Any actual intelligence on its pages is the product of my co-authors Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf, both at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.

We’ll be presenting the paper at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Keystone, Colorado.

While you’re probably familiar with Web 2.0, you might not have heard of social informatics. Social informatics (SI) is an academic specialty that cuts across business, information science, and computer science. SI research looks at how technology design and use are affected by society, culture, and institutions.

When revolutionary new technologies emerge, the usual assumption is that technology will cause social and organizational change. SI argues it’s a two way street. Existing business practices, institutions, professions and culture don’t just sit back passively and let changes happen–they shape outcomes, and even the technology itself.

The paper has a short review of academic research on Wikipedia, which is interesting and growing.

It will be fascinating to watch the ‘people power’ revolution of Web 2.0 hit the complexity of large corporations, government agencies, and different national cultures.