Managing the Platform: Higher Education and the Logic of Wikinomics
Compiling and editing an encyclopedia involves numerous management challenges, ranging from securing interested contributors, to motivating them to stay on time and on task, to satisfying the publisher’s demands, to haggling over content standards. I know these challenges from having spent the past several months compiling and editing the five-volume Encyclopedia of the History of Invention and Technology. Based on my experiences, I am now envious of Wikipedia: of how it is managed and of the dramatic results it has quickly achieved.
