ABSTRACT
The tools themselves are very good, but what makes them really stand out from previous generations of collaboration and community tools is the fact that they target individual benefits as a route to shared value, rather than asking people to share for collective benefit. This approach of networked individualism has proven far more successful in generating high levels of participation and shared value creation than before. Powerful network effects are generated by focusing on incentivizing and supporting individual action and then aggregating the results of these individual actions upwards for all to share. Wikipedia is one of the most well-known examples of this phenomenon. A wiki for one is just a useful note-taking tool, but a wiki for thousands of people can become a comprehensive, community-maintained encyclopaedia.
