Collective Intelligence

So enough already with murderers, toilet paper, pedophiles, celebrity miscreants, and hair dye down under…

I’ve been working on this fab project these last couple of months wherein Pearson, MIT Sloan, Wharton and a community-minded Web 2.0 company called Shared Insights have collaboratively embarked on the creation of the first management book to be written solely as a wiki.

The book, We Are Smarter Than Me, will solicit more than a million alumni, faculty, students, etc. to serve as its authors and editors. Slated for publication in the Fall of 2007, We Are Smarter will capture case studies and anecdotes that demonstrate how community networks and Web 2.0 tools have successfully been used by the business enterprise. Some in the blogosphere have called it a hybrid “mixing pros and amateur-generated content.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Bill Bulkeley gave the endeavor its MSM coming out today on the cover of B1. Publishers Weekly’s Judith Rosen did the same a week or so ago. Here’s the quote in the news release from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales who serves on the WAS board:

“Like Wikipedia, and with core contributors initially comprised of many of the world’s leading business thinkers, We Are Smarter Than Me may usher in a new model for how book publishers can acquire, create and market their content, as well as how their books can be distributed and used,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and member of We Are Smarter Than Me’s Board of Advisors. “I look forward to reading this work in progress.”

I’m sharing this info, less because it’s a client, and more because ours is an industry that seems to have embraced these new tools more than just about any other. As a result, we collectively hold a wealth of relevant knowledge and insights that will inevitably lie dormant on some agency’s Intranet server.

Here’s a chance to share your Web 2.0 successes with others (with your client or employer’s approval naturally), and by so doing, shine a positive spotlight on today’s profession.