In the spirit of sharing information, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams have published the introduction and the first chapter of their new book Wikinomics online. Readers can download the first chapter now, buy the rest of the book later, and after Feb. 5, help write the last chapter themselves. Titled “The Wikinomics Playbook,” the unfortunately-numbered Chapter 11 invites readers to share their own ideas about how to use open source collaboration in businesses today.

Using the Web to improve the value of their book is a great idea, and kudos to Tapscott and Williams for putting their money where their mouth is. The whole premise of Wikinomics is that by using the principles of being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally, organizations can take advantage of human resources outside their own hierarchical structures. (More to the point, organizations that don’t embrace collaboration are doomed.)

Of course, all theory and no action is of limited use, and Tapscott and Williams promise to describe “how ordinary people and firms are linking up in imaginative new ways to drive innovation and success.” The first chapter begins with the story of a small gold-mining firm that put all their geological data online and invited the public to speculate as to where the next lode would be found. The submissions surpassed in accuracy and creativity what the company’s own staff had generated, and the business went from being a $100 million to $9 billion company.

Unfortunately, the stories pretty much stop there. For most of Wikinomics first 33 pages, Tapscott and Williams repeat variations on the theme of “adapt or die.” The authors seem less adept at reporting what’s happening on the ground and are more keen to point out that Wikinomics poses a dramatic but inevitable conceptual shift for businesses. To herald the coming change, they even quote the poet of revolution, Bob Dylan.

Certainly it’s almost as unfair to judge a book by its first chapter as by its cover, so perhaps Tapscott and Williams go on to provide a little more substance with their rhetoric. Even so, my hunch is that the authors will manage to have the last word on the value of collaboration, even though they won’t write it: What contributors come up with in the final chapter as to how to apply and profit from Wikinomic principles will be this book’s real gold mine.

Other examples of collaborative writing can be found in the upcoming books “We Are Smarter Than Me” and GAM3R 7H3ORY 1.1.

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Kelly Nuxoll is a consulting editor for the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. She has a MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University and currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where she is the local Vice-Chair for
Democrats Abroad.