Barry Libert

Chairman & Founder

Open Matters

http://www.openmatters.net

Barry Libert has spent the last 10 years investing in and founding social media and open innovation companies.  He co-Founded Mzinga, a leading provider of social software, services, and analytics in 2001. He is also an investor and Director at Innocentive, the leader in Open Innovation for Companies and Governments.  In addition, he is a board member of the The SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania that focuses on the impact of open and social networks on our society and serves on a number of other boards that have social offerings.

Collaboration is not a new term in the business world. So what is all the media hype about mass collaboration—the collective action of many people working independently on a single project or a number of modules within a project using the internet as the primary interface? Simplified, mass collaboration is used to create change or find solutions to problems by seeking online input from large numbers of people. The concept seems to have been brought into the spotlight by computer technology giant, IBM. The company held its first internal collaboration (“Jam”) in 2001 and CEO, Sam Palmisano, concluded that, “modern companies could not prosper without grassroots input.” Other variations of the mass collaboration theme can be seen in Wikipedia, InfoBarrel, Google and Amazon and also on personal blog sites. All are user generated and some are revenue makers, but all require collective engagement and shared understanding in order to be successful. As with all emerging technology, mass collaboration software has had its share of problems. IBM experienced problems with overwhelming numbers of posts and threads in response to collaboration on a massive scale. Theme clouds were therefore developed so participants could follow a theme—an easier process than following a single word. World of Warcraft player, Shanley Kane notes that some collaboration software does not show updates in real time resulting in delayed progress with projects. Unlike World of Warcraft, which has multiple forms of communication, mass collaboration does not allow user autonomy for managing complex problems. Cybersecurity was a hot topic for the people involved in IBM’s SecurityJam. Collaborators discussed whether mass collaboration should be a closed model to ensure maximum security, or whether it should be open and permeable to infiltration by outsiders. This debate continues as mass collaboration and cloud computing extend beyond the current parameters, but IBM summarizes, “New technology alone doesn’t create transformation or fix a flawed process; it can however, accelerate progress and support people as they work in new ways.” To turn this trend into a competitive advantage, consider the following. Mass collaboration has come of age. Mass collaboration is disastrous for certain tasks. Try mass collaboration to drive change and solve problems. Use themes and other aggregations to manage mass collaboration. Lastly, experiment with mass collaboration for recruiting and other processes. Try mass collaboration for processes and efforts where networks of people are currently used.