International Rice Research Institute, Philippines
The successful voluntary open collaboration platforms of SourceForge for open source software development, and Wikipedia for open textual content development, have been utilized in an adapted form in an institutional context for more than two years. The major focus was on collaborative software development and support. While all software used was free and open source software, the deployment and support of these collaboration systems required significant funding, which was provided by the Generation Challenge Programme of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research. The platforms have greatly reduced the technical and organizational transaction costs of online collaboration and allowed scaling up at minimal overheads. They are therefore considered a success. However, the institutional framework of the collaborators was generally not geared towards supporting such collaborative work. Institutional intellectual property policy, code of conduct, quality assurance system, publishing procedures, and reward and recognition system generally pre-date Web 2.0 systems, and their hierarchical nature cannot easily be matched to the participatory paradigm of Web 2.0. These observations can probably be generalized and are considered a major obstacle in the adoption of Web 2.0 systems by individual professionals as part of their work within their institutional environments.
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