The Web 2.0 model removes any distinction between
creation and consumption, and the only restrictions in distribution
are the speed and security of your network connection. It is about
two different kinds of IP: internet protocol, versus intellectual
property bit versus unit many to many versus one to
many.
One of the prime examples of this is the Wiki. Wikis replace the
webpage with the wikipage, the location of a piece of ongoing,
collaborative content-generation (a project) rather than a fixed
piece of content (a product).
Wikis favour flat organisations and collaborative processes -
such as research and development, but also information creation and
dissemination horizontally across the enterprise. As such, they are
seen by some as a threat to traditional organisational structures
and management hierarchies - which wiki users say is precisely the
point.
Arguably, the fact that information can be corrected and shared
across the organisation encourages people to participate in both
its creation and consumption. People feel that they have a stake in
the information, and, therefore, in the organisation it describes.
Large organisations from Apple to Airbus via the FBI see sense in
this model. Here are two very different organisations that are
making the model work.
WikiMedia
Many of the leading lights of
the Web 2.0 world believe that data should be free - in both senses
of the word - and the WikiMedia family of sites is in the vanguard
of that movement, led by free
online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Wikipedia was conceived in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, CEO of web
portal company Bomis, and Larry Sanger, then editor in chief of
Nupedia. Two years later, the WikiMedia Foundation was established
as the charitable umbrella protecting a growing family of branded
wiki projects, funded mainly by donations from over 45,000
supporters. Its annual budget is just $4.6m.
Projects under that umbrella include Wikipedia (contributed to
and edited by millions of people, and the fourth most visited
website in the world) Wikibooks and Wikisource (out-of-copyright or
"copyleft" texts)
Wikimedia
Commons (royalty-free multimedia files)Wikinews
(which, like "microblogging" site Twitter, often breaks news
globally), and
Wikiversity
(free-to-use courses and educational materials).
Wikipedia.org potentially has a multibillion-dollar brand
capitalisation: an intriguing challenge to a non-profit
organisation that has 300 million page views per day, but less than
two dozen employees in a small, rented Bay Area office. With so few
page views translating into donations, can the "wikinomics" be
sustained?
The Wiki-woman
Canadian broadcast
journalist Sue Gardner is WikiMedia's executive director, having
joined the organisation from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
(CBC), where she was director of the company's website. Her
appointment from CBC - a site which generated millions of dollars
in advertising revenues - has re-ignited the argument that
WikiMedia cannot continue to resist the temptations of the
corporate world.
"We are not interested in putting ads on Wikipedia," says
Gardner. "We feel strongly that revenue generating should not be
about using Wikipedia itself as a platform.
"Our fundamental principle in monetising the brand in certain
ways is to seek what we call 'mission friendly' partners. They
might be partners who strongly support open-source formats, open
technologies, or free knowledge.
"We also need to ensure that the specific initiatives we
undertake support our strategic goals: help us increase global
participation, improve the quality of Wikipedia, or communicate the
core values of the project. We would never pursue partnerships that
go against our values."
Gardner was brought in to fix the fundamentals, and changes have
been afoot since she joined. She relocated WikiMedia from Florida
to San Francisco in December 2007. There the foundation rubs
shoulders with the giants in the heady atmosphere of billion-dollar
brand capitalisations, revolutionary zeal and high-profile
philanthropy that still characterises Silicon Valley today.
The foundation certainly does not lack ambition. Wikipedia
itself reaches one in 24 people in the world, and Gardner says she
wants to reach one in three. That alone should set alarm bells
ringing in any income-generating enterprise whose business falls
under the shadow of WikiMedia's not-for-profit umbrella.
Surely millions of unpaid people generating free-to-access data,
including news, for a global audience is many enterprises' worst
nightmare?
"Income streams for volunteers are not really in the future,"
says Gardner. "They believe in the power of a free project. It taps
into people's natural desire to share information, make it better,
and to inform others.
"It is pretty clear that lots of major organisations, for whom
intellectual property is their central business, might be concerned
about that. There will probably never be a day when intellectual
property-based organisations can give it all away - but they can
certainly consider better ways of sharing more of it."
"We do not think intellectual property ownership is bad thing,"
she adds. "Some protections are essential: trademarks for example.
But we advocate for the production and sharing of more free
content."
For some traditional businesses, however, the word "free"
remains tainted by old-economy notions of lower inherent worth -
not to mention dwindling profits. So what lessons are there for the
enterprise from the project's success?
"Wikipedia is built on trust," says Gardner. "In the early days,
the notion of trusting other editors and volunteers to 'do good'
was central to the project's early success, and certainly for its
explosive growth and rise in traffic.
"By starting a wiki in your organisation you are not promised
the same kind of formula or output that comes with Wikipedia, but
the core principle of letting others edit it is an important first
step.
"If you lock up the content, confine users, or restrict the
process you are ensuring the wiki will not be active and embraced.
You have to follow the energy of the contributors: let them build
the content they care about first and the rest of the content
should fill in.
"We are moving towards a 'write' web, from the previous days of
the 'read' web. Future generations will probably not think of web
content as being static or non-editable. The wiki has paved the way
for this shift in how we look at the internet."
It has been suggested that among the avenues WikiMedia might
explore are joint ventures, branded USB sticks containing reams of
text data (for those without internet access), and brand licensing
to mobile providers (Nokia is a licensee). Gardner confirms this
approach, and suggests that the sun may already be rising in the
east.
"We are interested in working with other businesses that can
help us extend our reach in the mobile markets - allowing more
mobile-web users to access Wikipedia and to improve the ability for
people to edit on mobile devices, for example.
"If you consider that a huge number of new web users on the
internet are accessing content from their mobile devices,
especially in places such as the Middle East and Asia, then you can
appreciate why this is an important area for us.
"Clearly some of those mobile operators see revenue potential in
working with us and the Foundation will in turn be able to generate
revenue by licensing the trademark, and so on - again, always in
the context of working with mission-supporting partners."
Jigsaw Corporation
Although wikis might seem limited in scope to "share and share
alike" projects, free resources, and backroom collaborations, an
emerging breed of enterprise has found a way to use wikis as the
foundation of a revenue-generating business.
The California-based Jigsaw
Corporation is one such company. Jigsaw was founded with the
aim of bringing the advantage of user-generated and moderated
online content to bear on the lucrative world of business contact
directories and corporate information.
To date, the business contact market has been dominated by big
online hitters such as Hoover's on the one hand, and highly
expensive, industry-specific print directories on the other.
Directory enquiries
Given production times
and the challenges of compiling them by small teams, print
resources of this kind are often out of date, of dubious value and
lie unused in corporate libraries. Any exclusivity they appear to
have is often based on the external research of a handful of
people, rather than provided for free by people within each
profiled company.
"Jigsaw was founded at a point of pain," says Jim Fowler, Jigsaw
founder and CEO. That "point of pain" was the former sales
executive finding that business contact details and leads were
often out of date or incomplete. Fowler decided to turn the
traditional data business on its head. "Corporate data is a
commodity," he explains. "It is contact data that is at a
premium."
The idea is that while business cards themselves might swiftly
fall out of pocket or date, the information they hold can be easily
updated if the work is done by insiders and tipsters, and that
information is rigorously checked, cleaned and policed by
distributed teams of volunteers - just as Wikipedia is in multiple
languages.
Business card data is exactly the kind of information that
directory providers find hard to maintain, but which their
customers rely on for new customer leads and clinching deals. Sales
teams, for example, need up-to-date contact data to reach the right
individual within large, complex, ever-changing organisations. In
markets where employee churn and turnover is inevitable, the
challenge is greater still.
"Data changes so fast, it is the basic stuff that gets left
behind," says Fowler. "If that data is wrong, then that can be
expensive for others."
Wikinomics laid bare
The idea behind
Jigsaw, he continues, is that contact data becomes a currency and
an end in itself. The internal economy of Jigsaw and other
wiki-based enterprises runs on people contributing their labour so
they can access the fruits of other people's labour: you get out
information or services of similar value to what you put in.
Thousands of volunteer contributors within their own companies
contribute information about the company's postal address, who
works there, what their job title is, and what their contact
telephone and e-mail addresses are.
Data is limited to business card level, so personal privacy is
maintained, and people can opt out of having their information on
the site. Personal or hotmail e-mail addresses are not included,
and neither are any other non-corporate data. "There is no trade
secret in business cards," says Fowler.
It works because the community grows as more people come to the
site to seek information. For example, if you want the name and
contact number of job title z at customer company x, you will be
asked to contribute similar information about personnel within your
section of your company - or to check data already held by Jigsaw
about it.
"People trade information on Jigsaw," he says. "Our system is
based on points. If people do not have data to give, they clean the
records that are there," he says.
Fowler explains that technology itself is not the bedrock of
Jigsaw and of wikis in general, it is the new business processes
and collaborative models that wikis enable. "You need human beings
to do this," he says. "We use technology to complement our
community. If there is no community, there is no business."
The company has 10.25 million personal records on file for
nearly two million companies and counting, provided by 650,000
contributing members at the time of writing. That said, user and
contributor numbers tend to increase exponentially on all types of
wiki project, and the reach within each company will grow as the
community grows.
"Every single record is complete," continues Fowler. "Usually,
most such information [in other company's systems] is incomplete,
dead, incorrect, duplicate, or in a non-standard format. We ensure
that all of our records hold complete and standard sets of
information."
Since Data Independence Day (4 June 2008) the company has given
away its "bread and butter" business contact information, says
Fowler, with a view to persuading members to pay for more in-depth
services on a subscription or bespoke basis. This is a classic Web
2.0 business model: give away your competitors' crown jewels and
incentivise your unpaid community to generate more content for
you.
"Web 2.0 communities need to be self-organising, and self
correcting," says Fowler. "If those two do not work, then the
community does not work." As with Wikipedia, he says, contributors
build up levels of trust.
"It is not sexy, but there it is," he says smiling. "There is no
reason we cannot be a $100m company soon. Our vision is to be the
'Intel inside' of contact data. Do one thing, and do it well."