I guess I’m trying to insert “whuffie” (Cory Doctorow’s invention and Tara Hunt has a book out about it), social capital, or psychic income (from Groundswell) into both a non-paid environment and a paid environment, in order to get higher quality content.

Thanks for helping me think this through! Does this description line up with your experiences? I really appreciate you sharing them.

I’m working as a tech writer on a wiki. Our official product documentation is developed and hosted on the wiki. (A Confluence site at http://confluence.atlassian.com/.) Up to now, only company employees (plus a very few selected others) have update-access to the documentation. The general public can create comments on the documentation but not update the pages.

But now we’re in the process of opening up the documentation to updates by the wider community. This is a very interesting process, because of the IP considerations and because someone needs to review all updates. Hmm, I wonder who that might be So we’ll soon be conducting a pilot to see how it goes.

We’re not quite ready yet — still tying up a few loose ends. I’m guessing I’ll probably feel the urge to blog about it when it happens

Great post, Anne. And great timing too. I love seeing these commonalities in the techwritosphere.

I’m accountable for the information I produce for the company I work for, but not for anything I post on my blog. Note that I’m not saying that what I’d write would be any more or less correct than someone else but the important fact is accountability.

Yes, there is a distinction between professional content and user-generated but as long as the distinction is clear to the person consuming the information then, as you say, I think the consumer wins everytime.

Where this breaks down is, for example, where the information is being provided for quite a small audience. Motivating a small number to participate in such a model may not be possible, the wisdom of the crowd doesn’t really apply when the numbers are low.