Billions With Zero Knowledge

Doing a lot of thinking and research on the role of community in the production of great companies. Collaboration, open business models and communities oh my!

There is a shift occurring towards empowered communities of users playing active roles in the development and innovation of the services they use.

In the process they are contributing the creation of new business models, new product models, new technologies and the creation of incredible wealth through the companies that they contribute to building. (YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Redhat, are just a few easy examples)

At the Web 2.0 Summit, I was amazed by the talk of community and the very different language being used. Some spoke of communities the way a Calgary real estate developer speaks of neighborhoods when describing 400 houses that look the same in a housing development that was built in a day and sold four times over before anyone moved in.

Others who clearly had experience building and developing communities spoke of serving the community, welcoming new community members and the importance of authentic conversations leading to organic growth as the model for success.

I’ll be writing a lot about my own meme community production (which I view as a different beast then crowdsourcing, crowdcasting, wikinomics, or harnessing collective intelligence).

Even Tim O’Reilly’s recent post on Threadless.com doesn’t really describe the incredible power of the Threadless community when referring to it as “crowd-sourced manufacturing”.

The community they have fostered around creative T-Shirt designs is their most significant asset. As more companies begin to look to community production as a means of innovation (or use the worse term of user generated content to describe their community) we need new models to measure the health of these communities.

Chris Messina and Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency have begun the discussion at the Barcamp wiki.

If you care about the role that you’ve played in the creation of these companies - then get involved in the discussion.

On Thu 23 Nov 2006.