New forms of behavior and organization continue to emerge from the evolving Boundary-free Enterprise™ as companies begin to realize the effects of mobility, communications and the ubiquitous internet. These forms of organization are of great importance to IT vendors and users alike, as they define new ways in which technology will be used. Like the technology that underpins them, they evolve continuously to meet new requirements, yet draw upon themes that have developed in the past. One area of importance is the growing use of Crowds and group dynamics across a wide range of behavior. While this has achieved recent attention as “Crowdsourcing” linked to innovation, Crowd behavior is occurring across a wide variety of important sectors, including collaborative work (where, arguably, it was begun in Open Source Software), Crowd funding, Crowd reporting, and across a range of innovation forms.
In all of this, it is important to distinguish Crowd from Social. Although Social Networking is a prerequisite to Crowd, it is fundamentally different. Social is about communication, and Crowd is about purpose. This being the case, the needs of most Social Networking can be met through informal exchanges of messages, and values lie in building networks and gaining or disseminating information. Crowd needs structure, because it must be established, the purpose must be set, format decided upon, actors need to have incentives to participate, participation rules and roles need to be established, results assessed, and the activity may need to be protected from dissolving into simple Social Networking, or worse, providing open access to information not intended for broadcast.
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