From a co-creation standpoint, understanding the dynamics of a community can lead to a deeper understanding of the potential for collaboration. An online community can be defined as group of people that come together for a shared purpose in order to cooperate, collaborate and work towards a common goal. The users share a core set of values, interests and a strong set of secondary connections. Vibrant virtual communities are critical to effective co-creation.
Zwass defines co-creation as the creation of value by consumers, (2010, p. 11). It can also be defined as “the participation of consumers along with producers in the creation of value in the marketplace,” (p. 13). This definition is expanded through the reading with a focus on defining two type of co-creation, sponsored and autonomous. In sponsored co-creation, organizations open themselves to the co-creation efforts of external individuals, including present or potential consumers. In autonomous co‐creation, individuals or consumer communities produce marketable value in voluntary activities conducted independently.
In both instances, the role of the consumer and the producer is being redefined in unprecedented ways. The line between producer and consumer is also becoming increasingly blurred.
Technology development and use means that new forms of production are emerging at a rapid rate. Van Dijck, suggests new interactive platforms “promise to make culture more participatory, user centered, and collaborative,” (p. 10). The context for much of Van Dijck’s commentary can be related to his idea that websites are conduits for activity and the new platforms of today have turned these conduits into new ways of delivering goods.
Zwass suggests that the nature of goods involved in co-creation is specific in that the goods are all digital and available to anyone with access. “ The collective processes of sharing data, information, and knowledge in the digital domain by individuals vastly contribute to the growth of co-creation activities” (2010, p. 14). With the mass adoption of technology, the major barrier to being a producer has shifted from lack of production capability to lack of knowledge. Readers can become authors almost instantaneously.
The following TED Talk used some practical examples to illustrate this point quite well.
The ability to become an author, producer or contributor is in part made possible by access to shared resources and information. Zwass defines commons as the universally shared resources owned in common (2010, p.18). The idea of common ownership (or lack of ownership) is such a new phenomenon in the face of copyright and individualism. Commons only works on the backs of those who are procuring or authoring with belief that the greater good is most important. Personally, I feel like a move towards Open Data within municipalities is a demonstration of this shift in thinking. While it is possible to make data open, it takes collective will and intelligence to make something of the information. This is where co-creation and collective intelligence are exercised.
The emergence of intelligent behavior in a collective has been described by Surowiecki as the “wisdom of crowds,” generating the concept of crowd- sourcing, (as cited in Zwass, 2010, p. 19). Crowd sourced information can be useful as prediction, preference, or idea-generation. In the example of Open Data, idea generation would be at the forefront of this collective work.
Trust creation is defined by Zwass as a reputation system built by:
- Word of mouth promotion
- Collective Sense making
- Ranking
- Sentiment Expression
- Task Redistribution
Trust in itself is a complex concept to study and understand. Trust in an online community carries this same level of complexity with fundamentally similar characteristics to the real-world; only there is a new level of understanding that needs to be applied in relation to the digital aspect of the online model of interaction.
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