Free COIN ASSETs
The explosive growth of the Internet
The explosive growth of the Internet and near-ubiquitous access to laptops and hand-held smart phones and tablets is radically re-imagining daily activities, services and products. This is fully revealed in Mary Meeker’s most recent annual presentation on the accelerating pace of this incredible tech revolution.
WORLD WIDE WEB HISTORY
Less than 7000 days ago, the World Wide Web was virtually nonexistent
then it exploded, growing nearly 500% between 2000 and 2010, with one out of three people now having Internet access. ‘The World Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.’
IT experts anticipate it will take less than 5000 days
Information technology (IT) experts anticipate it will take less than 5000 days before most of humanity will be connected globally to a ubiquitous semantic Web network. The emergent phenomenon of new value creation and social engagement opportunities occurring through self-organizing web collaboration networks are being examined in countless publications (e.g., Benkler, Gloor, Jarvis, Nielsen, Shirky, Tapscott & Williamson).
Collaboration INovation Networks (COINs)
One of the most promising, productive Internet tools to emerge are Collaboration INovation Networks (COINs). Witness the self-organizing open source COIN initiatives, as evidenced by the breathtaking formation of Wikipedia, daily growing and error correcting the world’s largest publicly accessible pool of accumulated knowledge and learning resources. In the decade since it was launched, Wikipedia has swiftly established itself as the world’s largest encyclopedia. Within 60 months and six employees, Wikipedia grew to 10 times the size of the largest encyclopedia.
Size of English Wikipedia as of August 2010 (2647 Encyclopedia Britannica volumes)
English version of Wikipedia
As of August 2010, the size of just the English version of Wikipedia amounted to nearly 2700 volumes the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
This phenomenal growth has been accomplished with relatively few paid employees (still less than 100). Daily additions, updates, edits, and error corrections are carried out by several hundred thousand volunteers, with content being translated into 285 languages. An IBM research team estimated that it took around 100 million hours to self-organize and maintain this open source public knowledge asset. For comparison, Americans watch 100 million hours of television ads every weekend.
New York University Professor Clay Shirky makes a compelling case that there are more than 1 trillion hours of television viewed each year by people with Internet access, representing an immense pool of ‘cognitive surplus’ that could be harnessed to create other open source public collaboration assets like Wikipedia.
The specific COIN, ASSETs, involves engaging users in expanding a portfolio of knowledge resources for using to transition local areas to 100% solar and high efficiency end-uses (buildings, smarter urban layout, vehicles and transit-, pedestrian and bike-oriented mobility options, lights, appliances, consumer electronics, office equipment, myriad plugloads, electric motors, etc).
The focus is on peer-production, exchange of software apps, animations, mapping and simulation tools, shared advice, posting of video and audio clips that explain how to accomplish tasks, skills and other learning and capacity building training aspects; Q&As and FAQs, lessons learned, state-of-play initiatives, regulations, policies, incentives, financing methods, monitoring and evaluation techniques and protocols, best performing technologies and methods for delivering utility and mobility services through end-use efficiency gains and solar technologies.