Creator of wiki software, Ward Cunningham, argues that the proliferation of wikis has proved that the for-pay economy is not the only way to create value and celebrates the fact that we have now more choices.

Treading on the pitfalls, but also on the successes of open source communities, Alexios Zavras raises seven principles that future online projects should follow if they are to survive in the vast sea of the Internet.

Being the first politician to to use a wiki to develop his campaign platform for the 2006 US Senate election in Utah, Pete Ashdown makes the case for open source politics.

Paul Hartzog introduces the concept of panarchy, a sociopolitical field that emerges when connective technologies, which lower the threshold for collective action, enable cooperative peer-to-peer production – of knowledge, of tools, of power.

Jonah Bossewitch tells the story of the participatory campaign against blockbuster antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, suggesting that participatory culture might give to way to participatory democracy, and highlighting how collaborative technologies can play a leading role in radical actions.

Successful Wikis, such as Wikipedia make ‘smart’ decision, argues Kingsley Dennis. They embody forms of an emerging hybridised collective intelligence, where the weaknesses of the individual are compensated by the contributions of the many.

Wiki politics are put into practice. This article focuses on the development and the rationale behind ARBI, an online project aimed at promoting awareness and discussion of human rights through the collaborative development of a bill of rights for Australia.

What are the possible consequences for a lack of consensus in tagging systems, ask Hana Shepherd and Amir Goldberg. Might there be bias in retrieval of sites that might systematically disadvantage particular types of resources or particular types of users from straightforward and intuitive online participation? Put differently, is folksonomy merely the tyranny of the majority in a new guise?

Examining the BBC’s experiments on facilitating participatory e-democracy, Laurence Pawley finds that such re-imaginings of political action must be accompanied by a re-imagination of the institutions that provide them.

McKenzie Wark celebrates Wikipedia as an example of a new kind of social relation, as a model for producing knowledge outside the commodity form…