A fortnight’s leave away from the repositorysphere I found takes some adjustment and though I didn’t go anywhere near cyberspace for 8 whole days I did need something to wean me off as the rain lashed against the Cornish countryside.
Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything is an insightful read, much of which is relevant to repositories, EMERGE and JISC in general. Some of it isn’t; like Boeing building their jets collaboratively and a gold mining company putting their trade secrets into the public domain and apparently crowdsourcing for insights on where to sink their next shaft. It worked. Spectacularly. And I’m struggling to encourage comment on my blog but then I’m not offering thousands of dollars in prize money!
The link above is to the book on Amazon; since coming back online I’ve also been looking at the website http://www.wikinomics.com/
For the record, holiday reading also included the wonderful Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale and the slightly heavy going Headlong by Michael Frayn which I did enjoy in spite of my lack of knowledge of art history (my enjoyment was augmented, incidentally, by being able to easily access reproductions of the Dutch masterpieces mentioned on…the world wide web!)
Now about that prize money, where’s the project budget?
