Self-organized collaboration : a self-evolving online collaborative production model for social enterprise grassroots startups

Abstract

Collaborative production is a process in which people coordinate with one another to accomplish specific goals. Widely recognized as an effective model in aggregating meaningful outcomes, it greatly extends the effects of simple sharing. However, two major obstacles to a successful outcome are the complexity and unpredictability of the collaborative production process itself. Social enterprise, as the rising force in advancing economic development, presents a wide range of challenges and unmet needs. It is especially critical for social enterprise grassroots startups to harness useful and meaningful contributions in the process of collaborative production. Through promoting nonfinancial motivation and collecting contributions at all different levels, the new online collaborative platforms, such as Wikipedia, have established a positive impact in allowing large groups to collaborate. However, platforms with a clear financial motivation suffer a great deal in obtaining multiple levels of constructive contribution and participation. Investigation of the methods aggregating individual (and often tiny) contributions for social enterprise grassroots startups may offer new frameworks from which a great range of applications can be extracted. Prior work on collaboration through digital platforms has mainly focused on a centralized collaboration model through highly managed and fixed Internet portals. This research will look into the alternative model, such as the wiki (a distributed collaboration), to find solutions for the emergence of an evolving collaboration model.