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Time names YOU as the Person of the Year

Time Magazine has named You as person of the year.

2006 isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. It’s really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We’re ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos. And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who does all that? The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

What an interesting overturn. Does this mean that the “men in power” understand the power of the “commons”? Does this mean that top managers will empower their own employees, their customers and their business partners to the max? Will the end users design their own product, the employees design their own tools when collaborating in highly innovative projects (we see that hapenning on the web, so why not elsewhere)? In such environment, do organizations only need an efficient (google-like) search/connecting service among blogs of their key people, projects, customers and suppliers, copying the model of Open Source Technology Group websites  in order to foster innovation and thrive in competitive environment? We are entering an interesting era…

A cool video on web2.0 on YouTube.

First round of reviews finished

I do not envy members of the review team that was appointed to review numerous submissions for our special issue “Interacting with Knowledge Management Systems” of Journal of Organizational and End User Computing. Most of the papers were of high quality, research rigor and relevance to the topic which me, Yukika Awazu and Vincent Ribiere announced for this special issue as co-guest editors. Now the authors have received our notifications from the first round of reviews, and we were happy to see that all authors of the ‘revise and resubmit papers’ have accepted our challenge and will be working towards even better quality submissions until mid January 07.