book – Oxford University Press – ISBN 9780195189285
Collaboration is in the end what the web has literally revolutionized in its first fifteen years. The collective knowledge development has found, for example, in the Wiki technology a tremendous tool to support its development. This book has been written by a professor in jurisprudence, trying to summarize and connect various dynamics in selecting and producing information flows can be turned itself into a tool for approaching our daily knowledge management differently. For those who don’t know yet, learning of prediction markets, deliberation, groupthink, information cocoons, just to name a few, dynamics, would be a true discovery. The collective rationality that can then be reached, facilitated by digital tool can easily lead to utopian visions. But, the author is a pragmatic writer, nevertheless enthusiastic about the democratic possibilities of the wisdom generated by groups of people (that beat experts more often than not). There’s a lack in a pure theoretical elaboration (seminal Pierre Levy’s “intelligence collectif” strangely enough is never cited), but the value in this text is in being more an insightful guide to innovative social dynamics than a definitive reference.