The wikinomics playbook

I’m very pleased to announce that The Wikinomics Playbook, the “unwritten chapter” of Wikinomics, and the first peer-produced guide to business in the twenty-first century, just launched in beta-mode yesterday. We’ve already had over 300 people sign up to participate and changes are happening on the wiki right now.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with what Don and I are up to, we decided that we would invite readers to help write the last chapter of Wikinomics. Like Wikipedia, everyone involved has the power to add or edit entries, discuss their views, or simply read what others have written. So far the results are encouraging! People have already come in to modify content, add links, and establish a new page structure.

The wiki will go public on February 5th, but if you want to participate early just go to the Wiki page on wikinomics.com and sign-up. We’ll send you an invite and get you participating right away. We’re pretty excited to see what happens — we’re inviting over 1,000 of our clients and associates to join in and new people are signing up unsolicited everyday.

Here’s an excerpt from the text on the wiki so far, just to give you a taste of what’s happening

As we enter 2007, we should look back at the previous year as a turning point in economic history. 2006 was the year the “publish and browse,” read-only Internet was eclipsed by a new, participatory Web where the knowledge, resources, and computing power of millions of people are coming together into a massive collective force.

Energized through blogs, wikis, chat rooms, personal broadcasting (podcasting), and other forms of peer-to-peer content creation and communication, this utterly decentralized and amorphous force increasingly self-organizes to provide its own news, entertainment, and services. As these effects permeate out through the economy and intersect with deep structural changes like globalization, we are witnessing the rise of an entirely new kind of economy where firms co-create value with millions of autonomous producers. We call this the collaboration economy, and it includes seven new models of mass collaboration that are successfully challenging traditional business designs.

For individuals and small businesses, mass collaboration marks the birth of an exciting new era—an era where they can participate in production and add value to large-scale economic systems in ways that were previously impossible. For large companies, the seven models of mass collaboration provide myriad ways to harness external knowledge, resources, and talent for greater competitiveness. For society as a whole, we can harness the explosion of knowledge, collaboration, and business innovation to lead richer, fuller lives and spur economic development for all.

Now help make The Wikinomics Playbook the definitive guide to business in the 21st Century.