Yesterday, my colleague Andrew McAfee and I just published a Harvard Business School Case on Wikipedia. In the spirit of Wikipedia we have released this under a GFDL license. Andrew and I will teach it in his second year MBA course on Managing in the Information Age this coming April. At HBS, all courses are taught via the case method, which means no lecturing by professors. HBS cases are designed to have a “managerial” decision point – which forces students to choose between several alternatives and come prepared to class to discuss their rationale for their choices. A case discussion is typically 80 minutes long with the goal of having the students engage in discussion with each other and the professor to develop a particular point of view about the case facts. In a case discussion, “there are no RIGHT answers – but there are WRONG answers!” My role as a professor is to make sure that the main teaching points in the case come out via the discussion with the students.
The case aims to get students familiar with the inner workings of a distributed community and to grapple with issues related to authority, decision making, expertise and norms of behavior in a community setting. The MBA curriculum at most business schools does a decent job of exposing students to managerial issues inside of hierarchical organizations. However, there is very little as it pertains to the emerging paradigm of distributed innovation. We just don’t know enough about what it takes to “manage” an innovation community. Can you even manage one? How do you build one? How do you sustain it? What kills a community?
I think there is a lot of wisdom about it in practice, i.e. people that are going about seeding, building and sustaining community and know how difficult it is to build communities. Our hope with this case (and others to come) is to engage our students to think seriously about communities inside and outside of firms and how they themselves can be participants in them.
I welcome your feedback on the case.
Andrew’s blog post about the case is here.
Cool stuff!
It’d be interesting to develop the case itself, and the accompanying discussion guide, on Wikipedia. A community-written HBS case would be a nice first
of course, you should dual-license it under something that is actually not as unwieldy as the GFDL… like a CC license. If you don’t do it soon, forks will be uncompatible. -Joe
The wikipedia is under GFDL – and the case has a lot of source material from it – so we decided to keep it under GFDL.
[...] Naechste Woche unterrichte ich hier an der NTNU einen Kurs zu dem Zusammenhang zwischen Aenderungen in der zeitgenoessischen Wissensproduktion und neueren IuK Technologien. Wikipedia ist hier zentral. Das liegt zum einen daran, dass immer mehr Hausarbeiten sich auf Wikipedia beziehen um ihre Behauptungen zu untermauern. Anders als andere Lehrende habe ich da nichts dagegen, die Studierenden sollen aber wissen, was sie tun. Zum anderen ist Wikipedia ein Kristallisationspunkt fuer wichtige Fragen der kollektiven Wissensproduktion ohne Zugangsbarrieren. Das zeigen Karim R. Lakhani (MIT) und Andrew McAfee (Harvard Business School) sehr schoen in diesem Online-Kurs, den sie unter der GFDL veroeffentlicht haben. Ausser dem Kurs selbst, der nochmal Wikipedias Geschichte erzaehlt und ausfuehrlich die Debatte ueber das Loeschen von Artikeln darstellt, ist fuer uns hier vielleicht zweierlei interessant: Zum einen, dass zu diesem Thema ueberhaupt auf diese Weise an der Harvard Business School, einer der Schmieden fuer die zukuenftige oekonomische Elite, unterrichtet wird. Zum anderen wie Lakhani auf seinem Blog die Wahl der GFDL anstatt einer CC-Lizenz begruendet: The wikipedia is under GFDL – and the case has a lot of source material from it – so we decided to keep it under GFDL. [...]
[...] While law professors debate the appropriate uses of Wikipedia output, prompted by Dan Solove’s post at Concurring Opinions [and see Brian Leiter, and see Paul Caron], Harvard Business School professors Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee have posted a case study suitable for analyzing how Wikipedia gets that way. In an appropriate 21st century spin, the case study is subject to a GNU Free Documentation License. McAfee’s blog posts about the case study are here and here. Laktani’s post is here. I’d love to convene an imaginary HBS classroom of law faculty bloggers willing to set aside knee-jerk formalism and various articles of faith — what should and should not be subject to footnoting; what “is” and “is not” “proper” authority; the “wisdom” of “crowds,” and so on — and to invest some time exploring Wikipedia’s governance structures via the case study. Would the experience change anyone’s mind? I have no idea. But their opinions would be more authoritative, at least to me. [...]
[...] Karim Lakhani published an excellent teaching case on Wikipedia (together with Andrew McAfee). While we’re not following a strictly case-based teaching approach at ETH, I want to integrate the case into the user innovation lecture next fall, either as an extended discussion piece (depending on class size) or as a student presentation. [...]
[...] For now, here is a link to an interesting Harvard Business School case study on the debate about having an Enterprise 2.0 post on Wikipedia. [...]