Mass Collaboration and Sustainable Development Partnerships

How and in what ways can sustainable development partnerships can benefit from mass collaboration at different stages of partnership cycle?

In the last few years, as a result of digital revolution, we have access to tools that are changing the meaning of collaboration and re-defining it by taking it to an astronomical scale, making it more open, more global and less hierarchical. The new version of collaboration, which is called Mass Collaboration, is altering how corporations make business, how individuals live their lives and how societies act towards the social issues they face.

Visionary organizations from private, government or civil sectors are looking into ways of adapting themselves to the new era by being open, acting globally, encouraging peer to peer communication and sharing. It is for the benefit of sustainable development partnerships to adapt themselves to the new era and to continuously seek for the methods of harnessing the power of mass collaboration.

Crowdsourcing, Direct Participation and Resource&Fundraising are three main channels of mass collaboration to the sustainable development partnerships. Collective power of different stakeholders such as Social Entrepreneurs and Enthusiasts, Beneficiary Communities, Employees and Consumers can be brought into the partnership through those channels.
Partnerships for sustainable development have potential access to massive intellectual and material resources if they can create the right collaboration platforms.

Internal and external brokers will play a significant role on finding creative ways to harness the power of mass collaboration. Those platforms might take different forms depending on the phase of the partnership, our target group and what type of contribution we are looking for. Nevertheless, the basic principals are the same and it takes a little bit of creativity and effort to design tools for mass collaboration in sustainable development partnerships.