Asia Commons/Enrollment

Subject: taking the Asia Commons to the next step

Hello! How is everyone?

As everyone is quite aware, the participants of our group was handed a wiki and requested to collaborate with it. We did an amazing job creating conference proceedings to share with each other and the world. Another fundamental result not nearly as tangible as the wiki is we now communicate as a community. These results shall not be overlooked and declare we've completed our first mission!

Over the past month, many of us have been taking our discussions every which way and making a difference in our local communities. Some of us have powerfully used our wiki to champion our cause, some have not.

I am now a believer of the wiki as a result of the last month. The intent of this memo is to give birth to an Asia Commons wiki pledge for collaboration. I'm asking each of us to make a pledge to keep up our momentum and embrace our wiki as a communication tool for action.

I believe it's now time to reinvent ourselves, declare a new mission, and bring our community to a new level. I believe the wiki is a golden key we handed to lead our future success.

I posted a blog entry in regards to our mission. I have not received any replies yet and invite you to to read this entry if you have not already done so:

http://www.asia-commons.net/mission_inquiry

Last week, I had a wonderful opportunity to speak to MarkDilley via WikiIndex (formerly SwitchWiki). He is clearly quite passionate about the transformational nature of wikis and was amazed at how many resources we exchanged as a result of a short conversation on the phone!

He was pleased to see our efforts during our conference and is interested in our success story - in fact, he is interested in our ongoing success! By this I mean he extends support to us as a community by creating a listening for us to share our opinions moving forward. He has been part of the wiki revolution from early 2002 and been through its ups and downs. I am committed we find a fascinating, fun, and effective way to collaborate together distinct from our past and embrace the wiki revolution!

To quote Ross Mayfield:

"Wiki pages provide persistent focus for conversations. Often times ad hoc groups form around an issue and gather to communicate.  Talk is cheap and transforming it into action is one of the greatest challenges.  Transforming a social network conversation into a creative network action is best supported by a wiki pledge page for collaboration.  Individuals can easily refactor and organize personal views of creative and social network resources for their own productivity."

From a statistical standpoint, we can readily see the challenge transforming our network conversation into creative network action: our group made 222 changes on the last day of our conference (Jun 8th) and a month later, we make approx 2 changes/day (at most). This is an order of magnitude of over a 100x!

There is nothing wrong with this - this is a conversation for what's possible. Let's discuss what we feel our new mission shall be between now and next year over the next week.

We will collectively make a decision when we are ready to share with the wikiindex team what challenges we envision taking on this new mission over the next year and listen for new ideas.

If you agree with this pledge, please say "I'm in" or perhaps more creatively, just say "Go Asia Commons!"

Chinarut