There's been a lot of talk about the impact of social media on mainstream media, democracy and politics. It's also clear that the 'collaborative' or 'sharing' economy is going to massively disrupt traditional business models and concepts of ownership vs. access.
I'd like to propose another area of exploration. Collaborative Works. That is, work product produced as a result of a broad collaboration between loosely tied peers.
Think Wikipedia.
I struggle to think of too many other great examples. Some loosely related case studies might include...
- Facebook Groups, for example, allow a few people to curate and collaborate to create a space for others to hang out in. You can even invite people into groups as part of the curation effort. But it's very rudimentary right now and the 'work product' is fairly simple.
- The Reddit community also does a good job of covering major breaking news and producing collaborative reporting and investigative citizen journalism. While the Reddit team has made some moves to bake more support for this behavior into the product, the platform was never really designed for this kind of use-case.
- Kickstarter (and other crowdfunding platforms) is also related to this, in that they ask the crowd to donate pure cash to a project. But it asks very little else of its users.
- Genius.com is perhaps closest to my vision. It's a platform for crowd sourcing annotations of lyrics, news and other content.
I think there's a real opportunity to take this to another level. Perhaps by applying some new user experience metaphors on top of traditional social networks to coax/incentivize directed effort towards meaningful work product.
My personal dream would be to see collaboratively produced/curated news. News that is collaboratively produced from initial idea all the way through sourcing, writing, editing, fact checking and distribution.
Something open like Twitter #hashtags but less 'shouting into the stream' and more 'composing a collective narrative'.
In the past I've suggested that adding narrative structure on top of social media conversation was the role of Mainstream Media and the traditional Editorial Process, but, except for a few bright spots, I've increasingly become disillusioned with the attempts so far. However even if there was great traditional editorializing going on, I'd still love to see what democratizing the editorial part of the process might look like.
News is not the only 'work product' that could be developed collaboratively though. I'd love to hear your thoughts. What other work product do you think might lend itself well to Collaborative Work? Let me know what you think!