Acronym

Anthony Williams’ general session at ASAE & The Center’s Technology Conference started off with a lot of the stuff that you’ve heard before. We heard the staggering numbers of the growth of blogging and the number of people joining FaceBook. We heard about the reach and importance and accuracy of the Wikipedia. We heard about Proctor & Gamble’s gamble to go outside their organization for more than half of their research and development. We even heard about the net generation and the incredible impact this generation who grew up being on the Internet from the time they could talk is poised to make.

Interesting, good stuff to hear, but most of us have heard it before. Then Williams, author of Wikinomics, got to the points of his talk, and he started to connect the dots of what it all means. I’m focusing on two of his points in this post – maybe others will focus on other points.

First is the idea of “Ideagoras.” Williams dubbed this the “eBay of innovation.” These are collections of people who gather together to solve problems or give expert advice. In fact, ASAE & The Center and many, many other organizations have been engaged in this kind of activity for more than a decade. Ideagora 1.1 has to be listservers (with 1.0 being the message boards that dominated the Internet in the late ’80s.).

Current online collaborative tools can be deeper and richer than listerservers – we just need to figure out how to do them.

The second idea is his notion of “prosumers,” combining the term producer and consumer. Prosumers want to be deeply engaged in the product development process. The idea, particularly among the net generation is becoming expected – Williams cited a study that 70 percent of those asked would willingly participate in product development for a company to produce a product that they’d be interested in if the company would just provide the platform for that inclusion.

Again, associations could be a case study of prosumer 1.0 as much, if not most, of product development involved members creating a product or program for themselves and other members to consume. And once again, what Williams is talking about is a huge step forward because collaborative tools today take product development out of the boardroom and onto a wiki, and instead of the best of ideas from a dozen people, you can capture the best ideas of hundreds or thousands of people. And, once again, this is becoming the expected model.