From Open Sustainability
NOTE: Victoria's Why Wikisourcing Doc 2009-08-12
Why Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises?
Victoria G. Axelrod 2009-08-12
Wikisourcing – crowd sourcing - is a bottom up approach to finding the “principles in practice” that contribute to making an enterprise sustainable.
Sustainability Indexes Not Enough
Well known, top down, sustainability indexes exist such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and KLD which sort corporations based on their overall sustainable practices correlated with financial performance. S&P Global Eco Index, clusters corporations by ecology related industries that cut across traditional industry definitions and geographical boundaries that meet specific sustainability performance requirements. These indexes aid institutional and individual investors in selection of stocks, but do not necessarily provide the average manager or business owner practical tools, techniques or concepts for attaining a sustainable enterprise status.
And now Wal-Mart, an individual corporation managing a supply chain of over 100,000 vendors, has established its own sustainability index with the idea other retailers will adopt the standards much like open source technology standards. To set the sustainability standard for others in their respective industries may become a trend for the world’s largest corporations. Be influenced by sustainability standards or shape standards by which others are benchmarked seems to be the direction.
The Case for Crowdsourcing
Our purpose is not to replicate these indexes but use the wisdom of the crowd to identify and profile the principles in practice contributing to sustainable enterprises status.
“What will organizations need to be good at in order to thrive in the emerging sustainability economy?” Michael S. Hopkins, editor-in-chief of Sloan Management Review wrote in "Sustainability, but for Managers" sparked by the ECO:nomics Conference, that similar events and discussions tend to focus on macro issues for global policy setting leaving the average business owner or manager in attendance wondering where to begin back at the office.
MIT’s Sloan Management Review Sustainability Initiative plans to expand on a survey of the capabilities an organization needs to thrive in the sustainability economy. However, corporate capabilities out of context of the industry and company culture may not be sufficient as a sustainable enterprise guide.
Our corporate profiles enable a manager to search by industry, principles in practice and sustainability challenges thereby providing an all important context. Integrated sustainability initiatives have the highest promise of success.
Finding the organizations with deep commitments to sustainable principles
SC Johnson stands out as a large private corporation that has deep roots to sustainable principles in operation. H. Fisk Johnson, CEO of SC Johnson spoke at the Cornell Global Forum for Sustainable Enterprise regarding their approach to developing sustainable products for emerging markets. They send their products to an R&D lab in China to be “deconstructed” for emerging markets and the “reconstructed” for developed markets. This process enables SC Johnson to have a single product with the most sustainable features. A principle well worth striving for.
Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises aims to find examples of companies like SC Johnson and more, large and small, by tapping the wisdom and experience of the crowd, you.
Resources: Business and academic research generating “body of knowledge” for wikisourcing
It has been three years since Don Tapscott wrote Wikinomics, a title clearly melding the business utility of connecting intelligence for productivity and profit. The up tick in speed to research and applications of social media is impressive. What remains a stunning truism lost in technologies hype is “human interactions scaling problems.”
Brion Vibber (CTO, Wikimedia Foundation) sums the issue in his abstract for the 2009 WikiSym conference.
Abstract: Collaborative communities such as those building wikis and open source software often discover that their human interactions have just as many scaling problems as their web infrastructure. As the number of people involved in a project grows, key decision-makers often become bottlenecks, and community structure needs to change or a project can become stalled despite the best intentions of all participants. I’ll describe some of the community scaling challenges in both Wikipedia’s editor community and the development of its underlying MediaWiki software and how we’ve overcome — or are still working to overcome — decision-making bottlenecks to “maximize community throughput”. Additional research is available here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research
http://www.wikisym.org/
http://pennyedwards.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/final-report-september-2007.pdf
http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns
Charlene Li's latest research - Social Media engagement pays off
