This is not the textbook approach to writing a textbook. But then again, it’s a book on the topic of ‘Management through collaboration‘ so it would be a missed opportunity -dumb, almost– not to tap into the collaborative potential of social media.
Charles Wankel, calling himself ‘author and organizer’ describes this task as “a new authoring structure,” a 640-page book that will be “produced using an immense network of coauthors” –926 co-authors to be precise.
The web site, features a deep list of academics from all corners of the world (Botswana, Bangladesh, , Greece, India, Turkey, Slovak Republic etc)
It’s a social media experiment on a grand scale. The authors are supposed to contribute via an invitation-only wiki. They were sourced via LinkedIn. The book has an accompanying blog that for the moment, however, is not well updated. But it is indeed a demonstration of the principle of Wikinomics. The idea that mass collaboration will become the new normal, where ‘static, immovable, noneditable items will be anathema…”