Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project. The poster child for such an attempt is Wikipedia, an impressive one at that. It brings together many different unconnected volunteers who, under loose guidelines, have created an exhaustive and valuable encyclopedia.
In the book Wikinomics – How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams list four powerful new ideas that the new art and science of Wikinomics is based on:
As they describe it, these roles are the basis for using the power of mass collaboration.
Freemium relates mainly to the idea of sharing. By sharing a free product, you are able to use the collaborative power of the mass, in the form of feedback or further development. One example of this is the way many bloggers supply a free product in the form of their blog posts and receive feedback and further development on their ideas.
If you want to write a book using mass collaboration, it would not make sense to let the contributors pay for their own work. By using a freemium model, everyone could get a free eBook. Later some of the additional ebook readers would buy premium products, such as consulting. In other words, freemium can be one possible way of making business sense of a mass collaboration project.
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