Radical Collaboration

A few weeks ago in Cape Town, South Africa, I gave a talk about distributed collaboration (crowdsourcing) and social currency. The general idea is that very little of what makes such collaboration work has to do with technology. People have made all sorts of remarks over the years about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the Ushahidi platform because that's where it's often perceived the most value is. But the value often isn't in the platform itself, it's in the momentum built around a given deployment and subsequently the value that collaboration offers others: This is a diagram illustrating some of the value exchanged in the typical collaborative crisis mapping platform. Green lines represent monetary transactions, white lines indicate direct use or utility, orange lines indicate flows of less tangible value that are more difficult to quantify. The smaller bubbles indicate what I call 'multipliers'. Multipliers are players that reinforce what would otherwise be loose ties, making the ties between two entities stronger and more binding. Jon Gosier, Director Swiftly.org at Net Prophet 2011, May 11, 2011