SXSWi: Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community That Pays the Bills
I’m looking to find a way for one of my wiki/blog based projects at Aptima to be able to sustain itself once our R&D project funding ends. Hence this session.
Speaker: Evan Prodromou (Founder, WikiTravel)
Wiki is:
- Open repository
- Open for everyone to edit
- Collaborate on the same work
- Easiest possible editing
- Web browser interface (almost always)
- Free/Open Content (majority)
Does commerce belong in wikis?
- Part of a healthy ecology of the wikisphere: personal, commercial, and non-profit
- Frees up public-sector resources
- It’s OK for a company to do the right thing
Other ways to support a wiki project:
- Out of pocket
- With donations, grants, government funds
- Move to a wiki farm
Four kinds of wiki businesses
- Service providers (Wikispaces, Wetpaint, PBWiki)
- Content hosting (wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia)
- Croudsourcing
- Get suckers to do work for you
- Then make them pay for it
- Eff that.
- Hates term crowdsourcing
- Wiki contributors are smartest, most altruistic people
- They may let you be a steward of their community
- A platform for knowledge (needers and havers)
- Croudsourcing
- Consulting (SocialText)
- Content Development (WikiBiz)
Rules for commercial wikis
- Have a noble purpose
- Ambitious, captures imagination of your internet public
- More important for commercial wikis
- People will be thinking about the crowdsourcing model
- Make sure they don’t
- Value for the contributor
- Blog = Ego
- Photo/Video = Friends
- Wiki = Purpose
- Demonstrate value
- Creative Commons
- Post Katrina, wikis were set up to find survivors
- Ways to add value
- software development (customization)
- systems administration (big wikis, keep it running)
- community management (be part of the conversation)
- external promotion
- carry the torch (hold the mission high)
- Be transparent
- Have a lot of feedback loops with the community
- Extract value where you provide value
- Don’t try to get money from places that you haven’t provided value
- Advertising: You provided bandwidth
- The leading way to commercialize wiki
- Sell physical media of content (books, cd-roms, etc.)
- Attempts to extract data can be bad (they are your audience, not your guinea pigs)
- Set boundaries
- Where business decisions begin and community decisions end.
- Be personally involved
- Best wikis are the ones where the wiki founders are involved
- Use real name, have their picture up there
- Best wikis are the ones where the wiki founders are involved
- Run the right crowd
- Be part of the wiki/open content/open source community
- People will judge you by who you hang out with
- Find people and projects you would like to work with that will add value
For such a short (25 minute) talk, Evan covered a lot of great information. I feel I have more options to apply to my project now.
Update: Liz Henry took great notes. She also recorded a great quote from Evan:
Prodromou says: “EFF THAT. I hate the term crowdsourcing. It’s one of the ugliest terms ever invented on the internet. People in wiki software are some of the most idealistic, altruistic people on the planet. We don’t want to exploit people.”
Update: Mike Linksvayer’s notes.
Adam: I’m so glad to hear that the talk was useful for you. It wasn’t a lot of time, but I hope it was sufficient to get across some of my passion about wikis and wiki startups, and some of my real concerns for well-meaning people who make mistakes in new wiki startups.
I also wanted to give a link to my slides from the talk.