The Participatory Web

Context:

‘I wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where everybody can edit.  And I started saying ‘interactive’, and then I read in the media that the Web was great because it was ‘interactive’, meaning you could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity.’

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

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Web 1.0 took people to information; Web 2.0 will take information to the people'.  Ian Davis

Web 2.0, sometimes called the ‘Participatory Web’ or the ‘Social Web’, is sometimes claimed to be a second generation development of online communities and software applications although many experts, including Tim Berners-Lee, maintain the concept is nothing new.  Nevertheless, the way in which knowledge is created and managed is bound to be affected by these new ways of thinking, which can be summarised as below:

• Web 2.0 is ‘an attitude not a technology’

• New applications are freely encouraged by combining aspects of different types of available software – often termed ‘Mash-ups’; for example Goggle Maps

• By contrast to mass communication methods, where content is directed from a provide to consumers, information is created and shared in a participative fashion by users; for example the image library Flickr, where users upload their images for other people to download.

• In place of ready-supplied, integrated applications, users can mix and match from a menu of modular, interoperable components, such as wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, social bookmarking and others, to build bespoke tools and services which exactly meet their needs.

• Web 2.0 is about collaboration - sharing information and ideas – but not at the expense of reduced profits.  Peer production, open source, open content and file sharing approaches can lead to collaborative business propositions which are more attractive than competition.

• Tools such as Google’s page-ranking algorithms or Amazon’s user reviews enable Web 2.0 to capture the collective intelligence of a large number of people, providing accurate feedback and sound opinion without the need for individual experts and formal accreditation.

• Exploiting the properties of ‘metadata’ (data about data) using Web 2.0 technologies enables applications to perform ‘intelligent’ functions – such as Amazon’s facility for recommending products based on user preferences.

• By aggregating a large number of low-volume users (The Long Tail), Web 2.0 creates a viable, alternative economic model which suits niche markets rather than providing limited goods and services to a mass market – replacing the economics of scarce resources with abundance.

• Leaders of Web 2.0 communities emerge by gaining the trust of their peers rather than being part of a vertical ‘command-and-control’ hierarchy.  Similarly, information is sometimes verified in dynamic a process which occurs after publication rather than before.

Therefore: 

Make the wiki an open platform for collaboration, where users can freely build new ideas, develop new features, add new applications, and create new partnerships and purposes.  Keep content on the wiki as open as possible, consistent with governing rules of the RIBA. 

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Knowledge management approaches and web technologies have always gone hand-in-hand - each decade of development can be seen to operate as a closed loop, where the focus of technology switches from the back end or logical infrastructure to the front end or user-interface.  The first phase of knowledge management coincided with Web 1.0, which made the Internet navigable. Web 2.0 allows users to connect with each other, Web 3.0 will add intelligence to the Internet, and Web 4.0 is likely to be built around a new range of social networking applications.  As these new tools emerge, knowledge management will be able to evolve in new directions – refer pattern Knowledge Management.