The Organisational Architecture of Participation

This chapter starts with Tim O'Reilly, but some of the tensions in the authors' use of his Web 2.0 meme map will pull the reader away from O'Reilly's business focus into their world of communities of engagement and learner autonomy. O'Reilly focuses on the commercial possibilities of Web 2.0 in his work, whereas the authors' interest is focused on a much wider concern with ideas such as Lave and Wenger's “communities of practice” and their later work on ways of using technology in online communities, especially the role of “technology steward,” helping those communities to make good use of technology for their social and educational purposes. An organisational architecture of participation is described as being “adaptive institutions working across collaborative networks.”