Economists now use the Big Mac as a guide to inflation and the cost of living across the world, assuming that the price of the Big Mac will always tend towards equilibrium. In the IT business Microsoft might equally be used as a point of comparison for the popularity of community tools. If Microsoft start using Wikis then their time has arrived, no?
I dropped in on Microsoft’s MSDN WiKi this morning. “The MSDN Wiki site experiments with ways we can integrate community contributions into the Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0.”
OK. And give Wiki’s one big boost in the process. The MSDN Wiki is basically a way to give leading edge users the chance to build up documentation on Visual Stuio and .Net. And of course it is another small step for content co-creation. There is a logic to where this will lead.
The co-creation projects that I know of, those in the pipeline rather than on the Web, are holding off the inevitable question. The more co-creation is encouraged, the more the question of ownership becomes fraught. For example if documentation is co-created with user communities what possible excuse is left for not opening up source code to the community?
It also poses ethical questions. If you look at Hotel Chatter, a co-created hotel review site you notice the strong ethical dimension deployed by the site owners. Ethical consdierations are what give the site owner the upperhand, or rather than ownership rights. They are guardian’s of the site’s fundamental purpose. They cannot however claim to be the owners of its content and retain an ethical position.
So the logic is that ownership is going to become rooted in something different than prorietary rights. It is going to be difficult to deny co-creators old fashioned ownership. It will be necessary instead to stake an ethical control.
