Give people a Big Enough Problem and Connect them via Internet for the Solution
April 24th, 2007 by Gordon Cook
Forbes has some very good material on line
Can a network build a potentially huge new product?
Nicholas Negroponte knew he would need a lot of help. when the former director of the MIT media lab announced in 2005 the idea of making $100 laptops for millions of children in the poorest nations, his support group consisted of a couple of professors in cardigans. The project was ambitious: This machine was not a knockoff of a Dell or an Apple but a complete rethink, from the motherboard to the escape key.
His solution was to open every aspect of the product’s development and design to gearheads around the world who wanted to pitch in. Negroponte eventually negotiated formal agreements with designers and suppliers. But at the start he envisioned a wiki undertaking and set up a sprawling Web site (wiki.laptop.org) with dozens of pages dedicated to the laptop’s every detail–its goals and technical specs, downloads of the latest software and problems with the latest prototypes.
For the remainder of thei article click here.
This is yet another example of open source and open intenet enabling group collaboration a problem solving. It is what Yochai Benkler calls social production in his book The Wealth of Networks. Sit back and watch this phenomenon grow. We are only in the early stages.
This is one article from a fifty page section on Networks in Forbes. For the complete contents see the left hand side of this page.