Value Greater Than The Sum Of The Parts

Tom Coates presentation in the future of the web apps conference makes fantastic reading. Months back I referred to his earlier presentation. Tom’s expression is simply at its best here. The theme here is about how to generate systems and models wherein large groups of people can publically create something together that's more than the sum of its parts. It talks about motives for social engagement, how to derive value from innumerable small contributions and what challenges this form of creation may be causing in a world of proprietary data. He shows the ways in which social software can be used to build aggregate value. Pointing out that

• An individual should get value from their contribution
• These contributions should provide value to their peers as well
• The organisation that hosts the service should derive aggregate value and be able
to expose this back to the users

The thrust of the presentation is that social software brings with it the ability to weave :
• Individual Motives (Personal Adoption)
• Social Value (Social Networks)
• usiness /Organisational value (Markets/Segments)

These are accomplished by capturing many voices with emergent order (polyphonic), in the process generating lots of comprehensible material resulting in opening up social value. This, goes the argument is achieved by providing people a place to represent themselves, allowing them to associate, connect and form relationships with one another, help them annotate, rate and comment and broadly look for ways to expose this data back onto the site.

While, I am not a great fan of Web 2.0 applications, but increasingly I see that this is slowly emerging as an important space( that is if you cut all the hype) where lot of creative energy is getting channelised and the potential for growth here is indeed high(particularly those centered around social networks)and as such these developments need to be watched more closely.