Evolutionary Crowdsourcing
I stumbled across an article in the ZEIT. It talks about how humans were able to take the decisive evolutionary step that sets us apart from apes - through sharing and cooperation. They continue to say that about two million years ago, we were forced by climate change to adapt our behaviour to the new situation. And only the ones sharing and cooperating were able to survive and develop additional skills necessary for survival of the whole group. So this became an intrinsic human behaviour.
Now let’s think a second about the digital space for a second. Web 2.0 is all about sharing, connecting. Communities where you can connect, advise each other on topics and share important experiences - make not only the indivdual but the whole group smarter and stronger. Crowdsourcing and open source comunities where people activley contribute their knowledge to the better of the group and development of new technogical tools are perfect exmaples that Web 2.0 is not a buzz word but a digital expression of basic human behaviour.
So I guess what we are doing is not really something new, but it shows again how important it is to enable human behaviour in everything we are doing digitally - to be able to profit from it in the future.
Not sure I agree completely. I think you are making an assumption that a lot of people are making about web 2.0 tools and I am not convinced that the assumption is right.
December 9th, 2008 at 3:07 amI think co-operation (the kind that separates us from troops of chimps and schools of fish) is powerful because it is deep.
Web 2.0 tools allow for shallow connections. Not that shallow connections are bad, but they are if they diminish our deep connections (friends, family, co-workers, neighbors).
With facebook and myspace we can now have shallow connections to thousands of people, but we still only have 24 hours in a day, so the time spent on those shallow interactions comes at the expense of having dinner with our cousin, volunteering with a neighbor, reading to our kid, etc.
I also think web 2.0 culture is here to stay, so we need to be aware of the negatives it brings in the door.