Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

In just the last few years, traditional collaboration-in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center-has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century. Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You’ll read about: Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry. Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production. Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems. An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
By Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
Edition: annotated
Published by Portfolio, 2006
ISBN 1591841380, 9781591841388
324 pages

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(.djvu, http://djvu.org/resources/whatisdjvu.php)

Lawrence Lessig: Code: Version 2.0 (2006)

From the Preface: “This is a translation of an old book—indeed, in Internet time, it is a translation of an ancient text.” That text is Lessig’s “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.” The second version of that book is “Code v2.” The aim of Code v2 is to update the earlier work, making its argument more relevant to the current internet.

Code v2 was written in part through a collaborative Wiki. That version is still accessible here. Lessig took the Wiki text as of 12/31/05, and then added his own edits. Code v2 is the result.

The Wiki text was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. So too is the derivative. Reflecting the contributions of the community to this new work, all royalties have been dedicated to Creative Commons.

You can download the full text in PDF form. The text is also available in a Wiki hosted by SocialText. And obviously, you can also buy the book at the links to the right. (A wise choice, as it is cheaper than printing the book in most contexts.)

This second edition, or Version 2.0, of Code has been prepared through the author’s wiki, a web site that allows readers to edit the text, making this the first reader-edited revision of a popular book

Edition: 2
Published by Basic Books, 2006
ISBN 0465039146, 9780465039142
410 pages

project website

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PDF (version 1) [Croatian]

Diana Saco: Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet (2002)

The Internet has been billed by some proponents as an “electronic agora” ushering in a “new Athenian age of democracy.” That assertion assumes that cyberspace’s virtual environment is compatible with democratic practice. But the anonymous sociality that is intrinsic to the Internet seems at odds with theories of democracy that presuppose the possibility, at least, of face-to-face meetings among citizens. The Internet, then, raises provocative questions about democratic participation: Must the public sphere exist as a physical space? Does citizenship require a bodily presence?

In Cybering Democracy, Diana Saco boldly reconceptualizes the relationship between democratic participation and spatial realities both actual and virtual. She argues that cyberspace must be viewed as a produced social space, one that fruitfully confounds the ordering conventions of our physical spaces. Within this innovative framework, Saco investigates recent and ongoing debates over cryptography, hacking, privacy, national security, information control, and Internet culture, focusing on how different online practices have shaped this particular social space. In the process, she highlights fundamental issues about the significance of corporeality in the development of civic-mindedness, the exercise of citizenship, and the politics of collective action.

cyberspace, heterotopia, encryption, computer networking, Clipper chip, cyberpunk, ARPAnet, Foucault, personal computers, panopticon, ENIAC, mass media, Information Superhighway, Hacker Ethic, John Perry Barlow, newsgroups, Visible Human Project, Cypherpunks, participatory democracy, Neuromancer

Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2002
ISBN 0816635412, 9780816635412
296 pages
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