The Language of Collaboration

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM and new to blogging, on the essence of open source, which isn't so technical:

Now, when you collaborate with your colleagues, they have to be able to read and understand what you say, whether you use a natural language like English, or mathematical notation, or tables of numbers. Likewise, if the collaboration involves software, then you would expect to be able to read, modify and generally share the source code of the software on which you are jointly working. Thus, in my opinion, open source software is just a by-product of, or rather a necessary precondition for, collaborative innovation involving software. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, let's say you want to increase the level of participation. You do so by lowering language barriers. Such as collaboration at scale with Wikipedia. Yet another way of saying that simple is hard, as is fulfilling Ward Cunningham's vision for wiki as a collaboration platform for experts and novices alike.