Collaboration Team 1
 

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Independent Research

Established Web 2.0 Technologies Effectively Encouraging Active Collaboration


Established Web 2.0 Technologies Effectively Encouraging Active Collaboration

Introduction

For several years now the focus emerging Internet technologies has been on so-called "Web 2.0" technologies. We would like to explore the emerging plethora of web-based tools and systems that foster collaboration, a theme central to Web 2.0. We would like to research the reasons these technologies are successful (and conversely why some systems fail to succeed), and analyze the methodologies that make collaboration so essential to the modern Internet.

Why is this relevant?

The old knowledge management platforms such as personal web page and intranets will be replaced by multiple forms of group authorship.  The future resides in a more collaborative internet.

Forms of Web 2.0 group authorship:
  • Wikis
  • Blogs
  • Tagging
  • Group messaging software

Goals of web 2.0 collaborative technologies:
  • Allow for spontaneous, knowledge based collaboration
  • Supplement other forms of communication and knowledge management systems by capturing relevant experiences and "best practices" (1)
  • Become an architecture for participation (2)

Characteristics of web 2.0 collaborative technologies:
  • Contain a receptive culture that is open to group betterment
  • Share a common platform that allows for a collaborative infrastructure(1)
  • There exists some form of management and administration
  • Implemented by web application that rival desktop applications
  • Architecture is based on social software (2)
  • Users generate content rather than consume it
  • Open programing interfaces let developers add to a web service or easily pull data from it
  • The web, rather than the desktop, is the dominant platform

Images:

 Result of a "What is Web 2.0?" brainstorming session at FOO Camp 2005

Sources:

  1. "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration," Andrew P. McAfee, http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2006/spring/06/"
  2. "Are you ready for web 2.0?" Ryan Singel, http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,69114-0.html


Image sources: http://www.flickr.com/photos/78726435@N00/62381076 http://www.flickr.com/photos/36521959321@N01/44349798 ?



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