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International Journal of Information Management 28 (2008) 194– 202
New learning network paradigms: Communities of objectives,
crowdsourcing, wikis and open source
J. Albors
a,
, J.C. Ramos
b,1
, J.L. Hervas
a
a
Depto. Org. Empresas, Universidad Polite
´cnica Valencia, Camino Vera s.n., 46022 Valencia, Spain
b
Avanzalis, Knowledge Associates, Paseo de Gracia, 12, 1108007 Barcelona, Spain
Abstract
This paper analyzes the new learning and network collaboration paradigms, their motivation and consequences. The origins of these
practices are traced to the development of the Internet and the impact of globalization. The paper analyzes their advantages and the
factors which have led to their development. Three contexts or diverse points of view have been followed: academic and scientific,
business and social. The paper aims to develop and propose a taxonomy of these practices according to certain variables related to
communication, social interaction, information, intellectual property, knowledge access and values.
r2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Networks; Communities; Virtual groups
1. Introduction
1.1. Objectives
The objective of this paper is to analyze, from a
conceptual point of view, new learning and network
collaboration paradigms. It will discuss their motivation
and predict their evolution. Why do these practices seem
brilliant, novel and different from current practices? What
factors have led to their development? What are their
future prospects for academics, business and society? The
paper will propose a taxonomy which will facilitate the
analysis according to social interaction, information and
intellectual propriety management, knowledge access
and social values, utilizing certain variables related to
communication.
The paper is set out as follows. First, the state of the art
is presented in the form of a review of the academic and
non-academic literature that studies the evolution of the
various forms of collaboration communities. These various
alternatives and their characteristics are then analyzed by
means of a number of variables, which are proposed in
order to develop a taxonomy. An analysis is also made of
how the various models fit with academic, business or
social contexts and requirements. Finally, the paper
concludes with a vision of the future of these communities
taking into account the analyzed aspects.
1.2. State of the art, learning evolution, the actual
communities of practice
For a long time, learning has been considered within a
social context. Bandura (1977) pointed out how a relevant
part of human behavior is learned and modeled by
observation of others and how these codified models serve
as a guide for action.
We will not deal here with the diverse schools of learning
which organizational behavior has discussed extensively.
Thus, from the point of view of Argyris (1992) the
organization learns through individuals and individual
learning activities are also facilitated or inhibited by an
ecological system of factors which can be denominated the
learning organization.
An earlier model of this author (Argyris, 1976), ‘‘the
double loop learning’’, postulates that learning alters the
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www.elsevier.com/locate/ijinfomgt
0268-4012/$ - see front matter r2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2007.09.006
Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 963 8776 80; fax: +34 963 8796 28.
E-mail address: jalbors@doe.upv.es (J. Albors).
URLs: http://www.upv.es (J. Albors),http://www.avanzalis.com
(J.C. Ramos).
1
Tel.: +34 93 492 03 92; fax: +34 93 492 03 51.
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variables or values which govern the learning process.
This organizational learning model has also defined
learning as a higher or lower learning level (Fiol &
Lyles, 1985), ‘‘adaptive versus generative learning’’ (Senge,
1990), or ‘‘tactical versus strategic learning’’ (Dogson,
1991).
Various authors have analyzed the efficiency of various
modalities of learning groups, such as formal or informal
groups and learning communities and sharing knowledge
networks, etc. These have been also denominated and
defined as ‘‘Communities of Practice’’ (Brown & Duguid,
1991;Lave & Wenger, 1993;Wenger & Snyder, 2000),
‘‘Learning Organizations’’ (Garvin, 1993), ‘‘Virtual cor-
porations’’ (Chesbrough & Teece, 1996;Davidow &
Malone, 1992;Hale & William, 1997), ‘‘Network Compa-
nies’’ (Bessant & Francis, 1999;Miles & Snow, 1995), etc.
Clarke and Cooper (2000) support the idea of knowledge
management as a collaboration activity in a social context
or ‘‘shared context’’. Moreover, some authors have related
work, learning and innovation in a common context
(Brown & Duguid, 1991). Thus, formal organization hides
on some occasions informal communities of practice which
facilitate learning and innovation.
These concepts have recently been extended. Thus,
Wenger (2000) argues that the success of an organization
depends on its ability to constitute itself as a system of
social learning and to participate in learning systems of a
larger geographic scope, pointing out three relevant
elements: communities of practice, border processes and
identities. This has been applied to multinational organiza-
tions and their need to manage knowledge in a distributed
form, sharing knowledge and collaborating beyond the
limits of their organizations (Hildreth, Kimble, & Wright,
2000). It has to be taken into account, especially in the
following discussion, that a community of practice is not
simply a club of friends or a network of personal
connections, since it must have an identity, defined by a
shared domain of interest. Therefore, in a knowledge
management system, human aspects must be considered, as
well as those referring to information and thus the
establishment of a community of practice philosophy can
contribute to the project success (Adams & Freeman,
2000).
Christopher and Johnson (2001) reviewed academic
literature relative to the communities of practice and their
potential development by means of networks and remote
collaboration, technology and specifically in relation to
Internet tools. According to this author, actual network
technology has advantages and disadvantages in the
emerging development of communities of practice. As
most of the collaboration is text-based, norms are reduced,
allowing introvert participants to share their ideas on equal
terms with extroverts. Nevertheless, the basic problem of
virtual communities is desertion. This problem can be
reduced somehow by means of suitable techniques of
facilitation and support, especially in the cases of online
communication techniques.
Kolbitsch and Hermann Maurer (2006) analyzed the
construction of communities around encyclopedic knowl-
edge and although they have focused their work on
technical aspects, and they also approach how to manage
the contribution’s quality in spite of the absence of a
responsible authority.
Dalle and Jullien (2003) analyzed the sustainability of
free software and how contribution systems reinforced
their diffusion. Some of their peculiarities have allowed
these systems to improve at a higher speed than proprietary
software and also to attain excellent market penetration
in their field with existing standards. Dahlander and
Magnusson (2005) analyze the case of communities of
practice in the field of free software, coexisting with
competitive proprietary software firms in the Scandinavian
countries, and their relationship with the latter, since they
try to capture the communities’ resources. On the other
hand, Osterloh and Rota (2007) analyze the phenomena of
the development of open software, and question whether
these projects represent a new development. According to
these authors, the open software community developed an
institutional innovation in open software licenses, allowing
them to survive as common property. Secondly, these
licenses are reinforced socially by motivated contributors.
Sustainability will depend on whether there is sufficient
community support for the collective initiative (Henkel,
2006).
Globalization introduces elements which influence the
evolution and development of these phenomena (Fried-
man, 2005;Raymond, 2001; von Hippel & von Krogh,
2003). All this appears linked to new innovation models
(Chesbrough, 2003, 2007). Some of these have also been
reported with diverse approaches, such as ‘‘Crowdsour-
cing’’ (Howe, 2006;McConnon, 2006), ‘‘folksonomy’’
(Bernard, Chautemps, & Galaup, 2006), ‘‘Produsage’’
(Bruns, 2007) or WebBlogging (Bernard et al., 2006;Du
& Wagner, 2006;Ras, Avram, Waterson, & Weibelzahl,
2005).
2. Development of collaboration models
2.1. Origin of the Internet
Internet origins go back to as early as 1969 by
ARPANET (Segaller, 1998), a robust network that allowed
communication among various military computers, not
solely for time sharing of high-investment computers,
but to avoid attack or connection loss between nodes.
In 1974, Vin Cerf developed the TCP protocol, which
allowed the long distance transmission of large data
packages. In 1980, the Ethernet protocol was developed
in XEROX, providing a network of individual PCs.
After the TCPIP development in 1982 and of HTML
language in 1990 at CERN, and Mosaic in 1993 at
Illinois University, the Internet era was established
with the launch of Netscape, the first commercial browser.
The number of present Internet users worldwide has been
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estimated at 1,117,000,000 million (www.internetworldstats.
com).
2.2. Initial steps in collaboration: discussion groups
Initially, computer inter-connections facilitated the
access of universities to scarce and remote digital resources.
Hence, collaboration was based on distributed resources in
mails and shared articles similar to news bulletins (http://
www.isoc.org/internet/history/cerf.shtml).
2.3. World Wide Web
A revolutionary technology, HTTP (hypertext transfer
protocol) and browsers allowed more people without
specialized computers skills to interact on the web. The
World Wide Web (initiated around 1990) is a hypertext
document system that works on the Internet. With a
browser, the user can read the web pages, which can
contain texts, images and other multimedia, and navigate
among them utilizing hyperlinks. Interaction was still
limited; the main function was publishing static contents
in order to allow access to numerous individuals. The web
pages had little functionality, but progressively a certain
interactivity was introduced. After this stage, portals were
introduced as integrated access to information on a certain
topic (Segaller, 1998).
2.4. The Internet bubble: electronic commerce and dot com
At the end of the 1990s, a revolution took place in the
business world, and was given the name of the Internet
bubble. New firms with a suitable strategy generated
e-business. The web became a new channel for customer
interaction. According to some authors, this gave rise to
the second globalization wave (Friedman, 2005).
The relevant fact was that technology had been
developed sufficiently to allow collaboration (Adams &
Freeman, 2000;Hildreth et al., 2000). Intranet appeared as
a common access point adapted to the particular require-
ments of the user organization. Within them, new devices
were developed (i.e., IRC, MS net meeting, Lotus
Sametime and more recently Skype), workplaces
for collaboration and content sharing (i.e., Ruppel &
Harrington, 2001;Stenmark, 2002).
2.5. Open source (and industrial property)
A new alternative for software development originated
with Linux (Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005;Osterloh &
Rota, 2007;Raymond, 2001). Open source (OS) recognizes
individual authorship but not exclusive intellectual rights.
A new alternative to intellectual property, Creative
Commons (creativecommons.org) is a non-profit organiza-
tion that offers an alternative to full copyright. It provides
free tools that let authors, scientists, artists and educators
easily mark their creative work with whatever freedom they
want it to carry. Offering work under a Creative Commons
license does not mean giving up copyright, but limiting its
scope. There are six different levels of protection under this
label (Crawford, 2006).
2.6. Search engines: Google
Search engines have played a significant role in the way
users work and collaborate. Google has been one of the
main successes of the new economy. Its terms and work
alternatives and its collaboration relationship has con-
tributed to breaking down a structured and rigid way of
understanding directories, taxonomies and the classifica-
tion of shared information (Battelle, 2005;Vise & Malseed,
2005).
2.7. Peer to peer (P2P)
This alternative involves a technical concept that has
extended its use to thematic social networks. It is utilized to
refer to collaboration networks in egalitarian terms and to
denominate collaboration communities where something is
shared. Some software applications such as Bit Torrent are
used. There exists certain controversy as to the shared
objectives and the intellectual property. The majority of
users of this alternative share music, films, books, etc. The
fact is that it allows millions of individuals to use enormous
amounts of data (Oram, 2001).
2.8. Web 2.0.
This label signifies that, although the Internet has come a
long way, it is still utilizing most of the technologies
previous to the World Wide Web. The term refers to the
utilization dimension and not to the physical network that
supports it (Le Deuff, 2007;O’Reilly, 2005). The objective
of this new concept is to facilitate collaboration and
sharing among users.
2.9. Rich site summary (RSS) and blogs
Rich site summary is a family of web feed formats
utilized to publish frequently updated digital content, such
as blogs, news feeds or pod casts. A blog (short for web
log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in
journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order
(Bernard et al., 2006;Du & Wagner, 2006).
2.10. Wikis
A buzzword originated from Hawaiian slang (quick) that
transmits the idea of quick and easy collaboration. The
wiki is a website designed to allow individuals to
collaborate electronically in an easy way for authoring.
Specifically, it enables users to add, remove, edit and link
other pages or resources and change contents, generally
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without the need for registration (Bernard et al., 2006;
McFedries, 2006).
2.11. Wikipedia
A great example of a very popular wiki is the
collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Its name comes
from joining the words wiki and encyclopedia. It is, again,
a challenging alternative coming from the unstructured
knowledge management happening all over the world.
From the researchers’ and scientific point of view,
Wikipedia has no reliability or accuracy. Anybody can
add, edit and modify any content (Korfiatis, Poulos, &
Bokos, 2006). There are several mechanisms to avoid
vandalism and the collaborators are always seeking for
errors. Few studies have analyzed how vandalism behaves
and how the community keeps it accurate (Vie
´gas,
Wattenberg, & Dave, 2004). In relation to the number of
users (contributors and readers), in October 2006 Wikipe-
dia ranked (comScore World Metrix) in the top 10 for
global Internet traffic, with over 150 million users. The
question is: no matter how reliable or accurate it is, who is
going to use the authoritative encyclopedias?
2.12. Folksonomy
This is a user-generated taxonomy utilized to categorize
and retrieve web content such as Web pages, photographs
and Web links, using open-ended labels called ‘‘tags’’.
Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but they may
be used in other contexts. The folksonomic tagging
objective is making a body of information increasingly
easy to search, discover and navigate over time. A well-
developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared
vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its
primary users (Wikipedia). Folksonomy, another example
of open collaboration, sounds like anarchy on the World
Wide Web, with people bending rules to their individual
needs and tastes, but it is not. In fact, tagging is at the core
of some of the most vibrant and cohesive online commu-
nities (www.flicker.com). Of course it lies far from the
structured comfort of a controlled conventional taxonomy,
such as that of librarians but is useful to make digital
surfing manageable (Dye, 2006).
2.13. Models for scientific collaboration: Science Commons
It is usually formed by research teams composed of
reduced groups of scientific researchers. It is a project that
uses the philosophy and activities of Creative Commons in
the field of science. The objective of Science Commons is to
encourage scientific innovation facilitating consultation by
scientists, universities and firms into bibliography, data and
other scientific intellectual properties, as well as sharing
knowledge. Science Commons, started in 2005, works
within the current copyright and patents laws in order to
promote legal and technical mechanisms to lower barriers
that prevent idea and material sharing (Klump, Bertel-
mann, & Brase, 2006). One example is LIGO Scientific
Collaboration (www.ligo.org). Some relevant journals such
as Nature or Scientific American work in this area.
2.14. Virtual communities
A virtual community, or online community, is a group of
people who, initially or basically, communicate via the
Internet, instead of face-to-face. Online communities have
also become a complement to the communications carried
out in real life by people who know each other. These
usually utilize some type of collaboration software (social
software) and adopt an appropriate name for their
purpose, such as Open Source communities producing
software in open code (Chesbrough & Teece, 1996).
2.15. Crowdsourcing
Innocentive was an initiative launched by a pharmaceu-
tical firm which faced a problem in designing a product.
Despite its large R&D department, it had no clue about
how to solve a specific problem for developing a new
product. A new matchmaking system was devised to link
outside experts to unsolved R&D problems. A monetary
reward was offered to whoever could solve the problem.
Scientists from all over the world competed for the prize.
The winner got the prize and the company got the solution
at a comparatively inexpensive price (Allio, 2004;Steve,
2006). Another example was seen in the case of Procter &
Gamble, who were using less than 10% of internal
innovation in their new products, so the company changed
its mind on the way they were innovating and changed
their policy on intellectual property (IP). They open the
patent to any outsider if the idea has not been applied in
the last 3 years (Tapscott & Williams, 2006). The IP
collaboration loop went further with the emergence of
marketplaces such as yet2.com, where ideas (under IP
rights) are on sale (Lichtenthaler, 2007).
2.16. Second Life
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and
owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003,
it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of
7,521,484 people from around the globe (www.secondlife.
com). It has become a full virtual world and is developing
on its own today. In this world, there are people, buildings,
businesses, natural places, state properties. The main idea
of Second Life is not the way we can see or interact with it;
in fact it resembles an advanced electronic game (Rosedale,
2007).
It has more to do with its social and collaboration
impact. Sociologists, psychologists and business people are
looking at this phenomenon, because it is based on similar
structures as our real life (Holtz, 2007). It has an economic
system where you can buy things, exploit commercial
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resources and develop your own ‘‘virtual’’ business.
Actually the currency in SL has a real equivalence with
real money ($). Any virtual individual can buy and sell in
this world. Enterprises such as Zara or IBM have their own
offices there and media companies make some incursions
into this second world to broadcast news to our first world
(DesMarteau, 2007).
2.17. The way to the Semantic Web
Finally, an important event is now taking place, and is
known as the Semantic Web. It is an evolving extension of
the World Wide Web in which web content is understood
by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedium
involved in finding, sharing and combining information on
the web (Shadbolt, Hall, & Berners-Lee, 2006). Semantic
publishing will benefit greatly from the semantic web. In
particular, the semantic web is expected to revolutionize
scientific publishing, such as real-time publishing and
sharing of experimental data on the Internet.
3. A taxonomy for virtual collaborative contexts
Various authors have analyzed and proposed alterna-
tives for classifying virtual collaborative structures. In a
first approach, some of them suggested a taxonomy based
on time and space (DeSanctis & Gallupe, 1987a,
1987b;Ellis, Gibbs, & Rein, 1991;Johansen, 1988). Other
authors added other aspects such as project management
(Chompalov & Shrum, 1999), communication (Jarvenpaa &
Leidner, 1999), inter-organizational boundaries (Cummings
& Kiesler, 2005), functionalities (Bafoutsou & Mentzas,
2002), etc. Academic collaborative research has been also the
object of various studies (Cummings & Kiesler, 2005;Olson,
Zimmerman, & Bos, 2007). Some efforts have been oriented
towards classifying collaboration from a broader point of
view. Bos et al. (2007) proposed seven categories based
organizational and technology uses. Nevertheless, no
attempt has been made to approach a broader analysis
covering academic, social and business contexts in virtual
collaborative networks, taking into account their organiza-
tional and informational dimensions.
To begin with, we selected a number of variables which
cover the afore-mentioned dimensions and which would
help us to develop such a taxonomy. The following table
defines these variables, their basic references and their
contextual characteristics. Some of them have features
common to the three approach contexts (i.e., values,
learning, diffusion), while others present relevant differ-
ences (i.e., authority, ownership, intellectual property,
collaboration, democratization) Table 1.
According to the evolution of these tools and collabora-
tion activities, Bernard et al. (2006) classifies them into two
dimensions: the social connectivity and the information
sharing potential or information connectivity. Thus, we
have three quadrants where the context areas, rich in
information, knowledge or social interaction are located.
A fourth, the intelligence sharing area (The metaweb)
means the future and the evolution of the collaborative
paradigms. A similar approach was followed by Bafoutsou
and Mentzas (2002), who classified the collaboration tools
by their focus on collaboration and information manage-
ment Fig. 1.
But how can we relate our analysis to this evolution? We
have tried to analyze how these dimensions relate with the
variables. Fig. 2 shows how these variables are related with
both dimensions.
Initially, a higher level of authority and ownership will
limit not only social connectivity, but also, as we have
already stated, the informational dimension, since author-
ity is associated with restriction and member’s retention
(Cifolli, 2003;DeSanctis & Gallupe, 1987a, 1987b).
Diffusion is highly related to social—and to a lesser degree
with the informational—dimension since larger amounts of
information are limited by a higher degree of diffusion.
Learning has the same type of correlation and is associated
to the organization context, as Argyris (1976) pointed out.
Collaboration needs some specialization and could be
hampered with an excess of information (Bafoutsou &
Mentzas, 2002;Cummings & Kiesler, 2005;Vie
´gas et al.,
2004). Knowledge access will be facilitated by social level
and information (Clarke & Cooper, 2000). The concept of
communities of practice assumes values implicitly, since
they possess an identity defined by a shared domain of
interest as well as by learning in action (Adams & Freeman,
2000;Wenger, 2000). Values change, as well as learning
consequence (Argyris, 1976). Nevertheless, some authors
(Bruns, 2007;Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005;Scott &
Johnson, 2005) consider values to be the core support of
certain collaboration communities. Profits or economic
benefits have been considered basically in those contexts
linked to business areas and open innovation (Allio, 2004;
Chesbrough, 2003, 2007) or associated to cost saving in
open source environment (Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005;
Dalle & Jullien, 2003). Intellectual property, in principle,
has been considered a barrier for collective creativity.
Nevertheless, new approaches such as Creative Commons
or Science Commons have been developed to overcome
these problems (Crawford, 2006;Lichtenthaler, 2007). The
open innovation and business models were developed as a
business response to globalization, increasing costs of
R&D and the opportunity of the models discussed in this
paper (Allio, 2004;Chesbrough, 2003, 2007). These models
mean a reinforcement of IPR trading.
The variable Democratization is relevant in social
collaboration contexts (Bruns, 2007). In the business
context, traditional business systems were not appropriate
for collaboration. It is not sufficient to assemble financial
data, marketing data and information from the Web, a
business intelligence system needs to arrange infor-
mation together in a way relevant to the user, and
network democracy is central to business collaboration
(Miles & Snow, 1995). The users become actors in this
scenario. Similarly, in modern innovation the model user’s
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democracy has become an accepted paradigm (von
Hippel, 2005). Thus, democracy can be located corre-
sponding to a high dimension of social and informational
connectivity.
Therefore, taking into account the afore-mentioned
considerations, we can then classify the reviewed models
according to these dimensions. Fig. 3 reflects their position,
showing the trends.
4. Conclusions
We conclude by predicting how the social, academic and
business collaborative modes may evolve in the future.
It could be expected that collaborative models in the
social context will follow the general model predictions,
since this is the context where the restrictive variables such
as authority, intellectual property or profits have a smaller
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Table 1
Variable Academic, Research Social Business References
Authority/
ownership
Recognition given by
institutions and existing
authorities (i.e., ISI, the web
of knowledge) and citation
rankings.
Based on acceptation and
relevance obtained by votes
(i.e., Google page rank)
Market success driven, i.e.,
Wikipedia as a knowledge
base is a de facto standard
Cummings and Kiesler (2005);
DeSanctis and Gallupe (1987a,
1987b);Bos et al. (2007);Cifolli
(2003)
Diffusion Through its own controlled
and closed channels
Open, through the Internet and
social networks
Based on Intranet, Internet.
Externally in marketplaces,
i.e., thematic business portals
Ruppel and Harrington (2001);
Stenmark (2002)
Learning Personal and research teams:
scientific community.
Excellent repositories for
publications. To be solved:
researchers’ collective
learning
Personal and community level Internally, organizational
learning. Sectoral/regional.
Clusters and collaborations
with coopetition
[Brandenburger AM. 1996]
Argyris (1976, 1992);Bessant
(1992);Brown and Duguid
(1991);Dogson (1991);Lave and
Wenger (1993);Senge (1990);
Wenger (2000)
Values Shared Shared May not be common Argyris (1976);Chompalov and
Shrum (1999);Jarvenpaa and
Leidner (1999);Wenger (2000)
Collaboration Unidirectional and slow.
Built on existing advances
(others publications)
Instant, asynchronous, open to
everyone interested in it.
‘‘Bazaar’’ model
Internally, as the social, and
guided. Bidirectional
collaborations with other
organizations, where it gets
more benefit which is most
implied.
Raymond (2001);Wenger
(2000);Lave and Wenger (1993);
Bafoutsou and Mentzas (2002);
Bos et al. (2007);Cummings and
Kiesler (2005);Olson et al.
(2007);Lasker, Weiss, and
Miller (2001)
Knowledge
access
Restricted and complex. Well
structured, but not
dynamically
Almost universal access to free
contents and progressively to
protected ones through P2P.
Free structures, without
directories, googelized or under
folksonomies
Internally restricted and only
well managed in large
organizations. Outside
knowledge absorption.
Bernard et al. (2006);Olson et al.
(2007);Chompalov and Shrum
(1999)
Benefits Contribute to generating new
advances built on others
(save time and efforts)
Community membership.
Awareness, prestige. Economic
profit
Improvement of
competitiveness,
differentiation and market
leadership (economic
benefits). Better and quicker
innovative capacity.
Osterloh and Rota (2007);
Raymond (2001);von Hippel
and von Krogh (2003);von
Hippel (2005)
Intellectual
property
Author and publishing media Community property, open to
anyone. Open/free licenses
In classic business: patents
and protection. In open
business, use of open license
(i.e., eclipse and IBM)
Dahlander and Magnusson
(2005);Osterloh and Rota
(2007);Raymond (2001)
Innovation/
business model
Closed, centralized by the
network of institutions and
researchers
Natural, absolutely open In classic business models,
closed and protectionist. In
open business models, open
innovation (i.e., innocentive)
Chesbrough (2003, 2007);Allio
(2004)
Democratization Roles and ‘‘hierarchies’’
based on authority
Based on relevance of
contributions, equal access.
Business intelligence. New
users’ roles.
von Hippel and von Krogh
(2003);von Hippel (2005)
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influence. As has been mentioned, values act as a cohesive
element. The success of phenomena such as Second Life,
Wikipedia, Blogging, MySpace, etc. (Bouquet & Favier,
2006;Nardi, 2004;Rosedale, 2007) support this trend. In
the past couple of decades, Internet use has grown
enormously while it has allowed its users access to many
websites and resources, it has also grown largely for the use
of social networking. A social networking website, as
defined by Wikipedia, is ‘‘a website that allows for social
networks to be made and opens up different forms of
communication’’. There are many different types of social
networking websites available in the World Wide Web.
Some examples are online dating sites and open market
sites such as eBay, etc. These websites allow users to
communicate in a variety of different ways. However, what
is interesting from our analysis is the collaboration aspects
in their evolution, as well as the communication aspects
involved in their creation and upkeep. In the case of
MySpace.com (the fourth web site in traffic in the world)
users come together to socialize and the collaborative
aspects are fundamental for their growth. Again, a recent
case, Panoramio (recently acquired by Google from a
couple of computer science graduates) is based in the
collaboration of users who upload their photos to illustrate
Google maps. As cited, eBay creates a network between
users by connecting them from all around the world in
order to trade with each other.
In relation to the academic context, we should consider
two subcontexts: learning and scientific. While limiting
variables such as intellectual property, authority and profit
have a lower effect on the former, they limit the expansion
of the latter. Values are generally linked to the develop-
ment of communication and trust (Jarvenpaa & Leidner,
1999). While the Internet represents an abundant informa-
tional resource, its real educational potential lies in its
ARTICLE IN PRESS
Fig. 1. A taxonomy for collaboration alternatives (Bernard et al., 2006).
Fig. 2. Social and informational dimensions of selected variables.
Fig. 3. Evolution of social, academic and business models.
J. Albors et al. / International Journal of Information Management 28 (2008) 194–202200
Author's personal copy
ability to facilitate inter-cultural exchanges through which
students may work collaboratively, first gathering and
sharing information, and then discussing and analyzing
issues (Kasper, 1997). Scientific collaboration presents a
number of challenges, basically solving the governing of
authority, democracy and profit variables. Cross-boundary
collaboration (Chompalov & Shrum, 1999;Cummings &
Kiesler, 2005) also present an additional challenge.
However, new initiatives such as Open Access publications
are being developed (i.e., Bentham Science Publishers).
Finally, it can be concluded that business models are
benefiting from the evolution of new alternatives of
networking collaboration. Most variables such as diffu-
sion, learning, collaboration, knowledge access, profits,
innovation open models, as well as democratization favor
its evolution. Moreover, authority and ownership, values
and intellectual property are neutral or have adapted to
this evolution. Thus, new models such as search engines,
Open Source, e-commerce, etc., have been adopted and
promoted by businesses which participate actively as
well as in, initially, social networks such a Second Life or
MySpace.
As we have seen, most of the social de facto standards
have developed into business requirements and firms have
adopted them. As an example, in technology innovations,
MP3 became a standard even though few sound firms
predicted its success, since most were investing in and
developing products with better sound quality. The same
may occur with Wikipedia, blogs or semantic web.
Further research should focus on organizational culture
through community methods and tools. As has been
pointed out, organizational culture seems to be more
difficult to change than the culture of the network
communities composed of people, and Internet social
networks (different representations of communities) appear
to be more conservative than organizations.
Acknowledgment
The authors wish to thank the Linguistic Department of
the Universidad Politecnica of Valencia for their support in
reviewing this article.
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Jose Albors is a full professor at Politechnic University of Valencia,
Valencia, Spain. He holds a Ph.D. Politechnic University of Madrid,
Spain. He has published more than 20 papers in national and international
journals including International Journal of Technology Transfer, En-
trepreneurship & Regional Development, Regional Studies, etc. He has
more than 30 years of international engineering experience . His research
interests deal with technology and innovation management.
Jose Carlos Ramos is a doctoral student at Politechnic University of
Valencia, hold an M.Sc. degree on IT engineering from the same university
and is a partner with Knowledge Associates in Barcelona, Spain.
Jose Luis Hervas is Associate Professor at Politechnic University of
Valencia and holds a Ph.D. from Politechnic University of Valencia. He
has published more than 20 papers in national and international journals
including International Journal of Technology Transfer, Entrepreneurship
& Regional Development, Regional Studies, etc. His research interests
deal with intellectual capital and clusters.
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