Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Innovations:Wikinomics
💡 In simple words: Wikinomics is the idea that lots of people can build great things together, like on Wikipedia — and WikiDeal was born from it.
🎯 In 20 seconds (scientific summary): Wikinomics — a term coined by Tapscott & Williams (2006) to describe mass collaboration, peer production and prosumers — became in 2013–2014 a pedagogical innovation research project co-signed by members of the Ynternet.org Foundation (Geneva), which today governs WikiDeal. The project set out to spread the wiki behaviours observed on Wikipedia and beyond: anyone can edit, participative governance, every contribution is traceable, and decision-making that is not pyramidal but scales with complexity — consensual and sociocratic when complexity is high (see Wikipedia Governance). In its original form, documented in resources such as the WikiSkills handbook, all of these behaviours were focused on competence development (VET, Open Badges, ECVET). WikiDeal keeps the behaviours but changes the object: the pedagogical dimension becomes a contractual dimension — fair, wiki-governed contracts with just redistribution of value, operationalised through collaborative contract editing.
The article reproduced below, unchanged from 2013–2014, is the fertile ground — the seedbed — from which WikiDeal grew. Read it knowing what it does not yet contain: the leap from competences to contracts. Everything the project taught people to do with skills — edit openly, govern together, trace every contribution — WikiDeal now applies to agreements and the sharing of value. Same wiki behaviours, new stakes.
Summary
Origin of the term
The term Wikinomics was introduced and framed internationally by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006). It describes how open, wiki-style collaboration restructures the socio-economic organisation of post-industrial societies. Its central concepts — mass creativity, peer production and co-creation — blur the traditional distinction between producers and consumers, giving rise to the figure of the "prosumer", who both consumes and produces value.
The limits Wikinomics exposed
The Wikinomics vision has often been criticised as a subtle form of labour outsourcing: unpaid or under-recognised "prosumer" work can become a way of extracting free labour from consumers and collaborators, while the majority of the value is captured elsewhere. Drawing on authors such as Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006) and José van Dijck (The Culture of Connectivity, 2013), the critique warns that a "culture of sharing" can mask a real asymmetry between the value created by a community and the reward it actually receives.
This is precisely the tension WikiDeal was designed to address: not to abandon mass collaboration, but to build the economic and governance mechanisms that let collaborative value be recognised, tracked and fairly redistributed.
The 2013–2014 Wikinomics project
Following the WikiSkills European network, the Wikinomics project set out to turn the Wikinomics idea into a positive, workable pedagogy rather than leaving it as a critique. It used free-culture and wiki methodologies as the basis for an innovative approach to Vocational Education and Training (VET), and connected the work to a transnational European network of practitioners and to TEDx events.
Its main lines of work were:
- Key competences: developing a framework of key competences, transversal to all VET sectors, required for employability in a rapidly changing labour market — aligned with the European Key Competences for Lifelong Learning.
- ECVET transfer: applying the European Credit system for VET (ECVET) so that learning outcomes could be assessed, recognised, made transparent, transferable and portable across European countries.
- Open Badges: using Mozilla Open Badges to materialise learning outcomes, with qualification profiles described as units of learning outcomes, assessed through both self-assessment and peer assessment, in academic and professional contexts alike.
The project's conclusions proposed to enrich the Wikinomics approach through pilot VET projects, collaborative writing and evaluation, and a continually maintained transnational network of open-badge issuers, involving VET teachers, trainers and students as well as businesses and associations.
A fertile ground for WikiDeal
The Wikinomics project (2013–2014) is best understood as one of the fertile grounds (seedbeds) on which WikiDeal was later developed. Three threads carry directly into WikiDeal:
- Fair recognition of collaborative value. The project's core worry — that collaborative labour can be extracted without fair reward — is the problem WikiDeal's economic innovations (subscription tokens, need-driven funding, real-cost commission, revenue spreading) are built to solve.
- Wiki governance applied to the economy. The reliance on transparent wiki processes and communities of practice prefigures WikiDeal's Wikipedia-style governance and collaborative contract editing.
- Recognition infrastructure. The Open Badges / ECVET emphasis on portable, peer-validated recognition anticipates WikiDeal's attention to trust, endorsement and verifiable track records.
The academic formalisation of this work was published as:
- Priftis, A., Bondolfi, T., Boisselier, Y. (2014). Revisiting the Wikinomics Concept: Towards New Methodological Approaches. In: Cao, Y. et al. (Eds.), ICWL 2014 Workshops, LNCS 8699, pp. 153–161. Springer International Publishing Switzerland. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-13296-9_17
Two of the three co-authors were affiliated with the Ynternet.org Foundation (Geneva), which today stewards WikiDeal's governance — making Wikinomics a direct lineage rather than a distant inspiration.
Source material on Wikibooks
The practical materials of the Wikinomics and WikiSkills projects live as an open book on Wikibooks (the free-content textbook project of the Wikimedia ecosystem):
State of the art
- Tapscott, D., Williams, A.D. (2006). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio, New York.
- Tapscott, D., Williams, A.D. (2010). Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World. Portfolio/Penguin.
- Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press.
- Van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press.
- Priftis, A., Bondolfi, T., Boisselier, Y. (2014). Revisiting the Wikinomics Concept: Towards New Methodological Approaches. ICWL 2014 Workshops, LNCS 8699, pp. 153–161. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-13296-9_17