Mass Collaboration

Introduction

The main theme of our project is mass collaboration and how the Internet unites people to achieve common goals. It researches how people solve problems relevant to today’s society via the Internet.

Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project. Such projects typically take place on the Internet using social software and collaboration tools such as wiki technologies. A wiki is a website where users can add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often created collaboratively by multiple users. In every corner of the globe, businesses, organizations, and individuals alike are using mass collaboration to revolutionize not only the way we work, but how we live, learn, create and care for each other.

The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide, along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation has become economical. "There's a fundamental shift in power happening," says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. "Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in."

Peer production represents a change in the economy. More than two centuries ago, James Watt's steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution, centralizing the means of production in huge, powerful corporations that had the capital to achieve economies of scale. Now cheap computers and new social software and services are starting to give production power back to the people. They interact in online communities, while influencing each other in order to solve a certain problem in that respective community.

How can mass collaboration help us?

In a general sense, mass collaboration unites people with similar ideas and concepts. Online communities are used to garner support for an idea or to protest against government’s decisions, thus people become more confident as they realize that their ideas are supported by their peers. Moreover, it provides an easier method of data collecting and cataloging. For instance, let’s say you have a large project one which requires a lot of knowledge being updated as the project goes along. Mass collaboration allows for this to happen and ends up becoming a well-documented database that can be accessed by anyone involved to better understand what has been done, what needs to be done, and how they can apply that information to their duties so they can in turn add their results to the overall database.

Duolingo

A concrete example of how beneficial mass collaboration can be is the innovative idea of Luis von Ahn. He is an entrepreneur and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. As of 2011, von Ahn is working on Duolingo, a project that aims to coordinate millions of people to translate the Web into every major language. Duolingo is a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform (crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production process that involves outsourcing tasks to a network of people, also known as the crowd). The service is designed so that as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents. Currently, the site offers Spanish and German courses for English speakers. They plan to add French, Italian and Chinese. Duolingo launched in private beta on November 30, 2011, and has accumulated a waiting list of more than 100,000 users. As of January 19, 2012, the service has translated over 45,000 sentences. This example shows how large numbers of people collaborate efficiently in order to achieve a common goal and for no financial compensation, only an intellectual one.

Literature Review

As our topic is mass-collaboration we referred to the most well-known author on this subject which is Don Tapscott the writer of Wikinomics and Macrowikinomics. The first book, Wikinomics, explains how companies can use the new Internet 2.0 to reduce transaction costs and sometime even develop new products or make huge research with little effort through the use of mass-collaboration and the Internet. The potential of these ideas was great enough to make us to read Macrowikinomics. Here the accent is on society and how mass-collaboration between individuals for a common goal can bring incredible results and at the end of our research we have even suggested some ideas that could be practically implemented in Romania.

Research Methodology

Surveys represent one of the most common types of quantitative social science research. In survey research, the researcher selects a sample from a population and administers a standardized questionnaire to them. The questionnaire, or survey, can be a written document that is completed by the person being surveyed, an online questionnaire, a face-to-face interview, or a telephone interview. Using surveys, it is possible to collect data from large or small populations.

In order to demonstrate how mass collaboration works in the Romanian society, we have conducted a survey on a sample of 52 people.