Age of the Wikimania: the importance of online collaboration

The Web 2.0 and the easy access to bandwidth has ushered in some new paradigms in collaboration. The rise of the wikipedia (in general the open source wiki frameworks such as mediawiki) and P2P frameworks have transformed knowledge sharing in the open-source (or should i say open-knowledge) world.

The use of online collaboration technologies in managing knowledge sharing has made me a strong proponent of open-source collaborative systems - wikipedia, sourceforge, bugzilla, mind-maps to name a few. The success of the open source revolution can be attributed to different technology advancements in on-line collaborative systems. If google made it simpler for people to use the internet, wikipedia has brought knowledge sharing at the click of the mouse. These technologies have now started seeping into the intranet of organizations and effectively used for knowledge sharing and information management within and between groups. The ubiquitous nature of groups - often positioned across time zones and the need of easy-to-manage knowledge bases have championed the use of online collaboration.

In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams aptly desribe the use of mass collaboration for improving internal organizational processes to knowledge sharing. This is an interesting read and strongly recommended for those who are excited about the charms of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

If you are interested in setting up a wiki for your organization, I strongly recommed using mediawiki. Mediawiki with a mySQL support works great. All you would need is php, apache and a mysql server on a linux box to get going. It has easy to integrate features with any user management system.

another blog.....

My older blog (nimitkumar.blogspot.com) has a very high variance - evident of any kid growing up through college and early work-years. Waking up to my varied (and geeky) interest in technology, innovation and economics I decided to start another weblog where I can maintain a collection of my thoughts-random, so what. You may have to be patient with me on this one - my thoughts could be very naive and sometimes debatable.

As Nassim Taleb says - "You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race".

I definitely don't expect myself to change anything in this world. Probably I will make some (necessary and positive) amendments to myself and have a good laugh.


Cheers,
-N.