Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
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Web 2.0 services refer to web-based applications that allow a user to create and publish their own unique content. They also include services that allow mass collaboration among self-organized communities. Tim O'Reilly defines Web 2.0 as any set of tools that are able to harness the collective intelligence of groups of people and put that to work toward a shared goal. These services focus on distributed collaboration, information sharing, interoperability, and information reuse -- many of the same issues that military simulation projects face. Simulation-based training has always wrestled with issues in user interfaces, collaboration, networking, standardization, and interoperability. These problems have often been more advanced than those faced in the business IT and C4I communities. As a result we have developed a culture in which we develop our own software, hardware, and networking solutions. However, recent advances in fields like computer gaming and business IT have shown that commercial technologies can become the basis for simulation systems. Over the last two years consumer IT applications have emerged that may have useful application in distributed simulation. Social networks, wikis, blogs, web page tagging, photo and video sharing, and tools for personal 3D game development have all attracted significant attention in the commercial world by bringing distributed processing technologies to the mass consumer. Web 2.0 companies are creating tools which answer important problems around distributed, interoperable, interactive, user centered experiences. This paper identifies many of these applications, defines useful categories for understanding them, and illustrates valuable applications in simulation and training. Just as computer games brought powerful commercial technologies to military training, Web 2.0 applications have similar potential which is not yet generally recognized. The goal of this paper is to begin a dialog on the useful application of these technologies within the interactive simulation community.