Wikinomics : How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Mass collaboratoin changing how societies harness knowledge. "coinnovate with everyone (esp. customers), shares resouces that were previously closely guarded, harnesses the power of mass collaboration and behaves as not as a multinational corp. but something new." - p.20

Traditional view --

"[organizations] innovate differentiate, and compete by doing certain things right: by having superior human capital; protecting their Intellectual property fierceley, focusing on customers, thinking globally but acting locally; and by executing well. But new [organizations] world is rendering each of these principles insufficently -- completely inappropriate." -p20

Principles of Wikinomics

I think these principles can help us organize our approach to the presentation. in some ways libraries are good at some of these principles: OCLC, union catalogs, consortials buying, etc. the library is, in fact, an exemplar of some of these principles. We should say this -- flesh it out. I'm not huge on library history, but I think we can draw parallels in librarianship.

However! ok - BUT these principles are also very much challenges to how we operate. No secret here: we are bureaucratic and hierarchical and we most def. haven't been able to keep up with the rapid advances in technologies. And because of the hierarchical nature of research libraries, we don't do great at self-organization or agilely develop new knowledge or info products. We are also overly protective of information about how our organization operates. Customers can't easily "see" us or how we make decisions, let alone interact with us in any meaningful way.

Ok -what does this have to do wikis???

well - it is a tool that can enable these principles. so in some ways library history helps us b/c we have tradition of many good things, but we are also in a bad situation b/c we have also adopted inhibiting models of organization and communication.