With the loss of access to information resources as a critical membership value point, the importance of the community of members has grown enormously for most membership organizations. These emerging Web 2.0 tools and models represent a major threat to the proprietary value of a membership community.

My take is that in order to stay relevant, membership organizations such as associations must find new ways to define the value they provide, and base the membership value proposition on what a member gains through membership that would not otherwise be possible. Access to one another is simply not enough. We need to leverage these relationship just as we learned to leverage rather than sell information content. Organizations that fail to achieve this goal face an increasingly risky future.

Enter the world of Web 2.0, bringing with it a powerful new model of mass collaboration and defining another dimension of collective wisdom. Rather than applied to a predictive or measurement outcome, this form of collective wisdom is focused on the development of knowledge resources that greatly exceeds that of any one of the individuals.

The best known example is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia developed almost entirely by voluntary contributions of thousands of individuals. Ranging from highly technical scientific entries such as red shift analysis of distant stars to the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the articles are substantive, footnoted, and at least approach, if not reach, the same levels of quality and completeness as traditional encyclopedias developed by armies of individual experts.

The wiki tool enables tens of thousands of individual users of Wikipedia to add their own knowledge in specific areas, make corrections to information they believe is in error, and add their voice to individual entries that may include controversial or disputed information. This process of collective addition and editing has produced a remarkable outcome. Wikipedia is now contains 2.2 million entries in its English edition and has hundreds of thousands of entries in each of nine other language editions.

All of this including translation into other languages has be largely organized and implemented by volunteers. The Wikipedia staff reportedly has grown recently from 5 to 10. It is a remarkable achievement.

The implications for all types of organizations are substantial. For membership organizations, mass collaboration offers a new model of volunteer engagement that far exceeds anything we've seen to date. For companies, it offers a new opportunity to actively engage customers in the process of product development and refinement, in essence, helping the company create the products and services those customers want to buy.

• Web 2.0 for Associations
  Associated General Contractors of America Annual Convention, March 10-14, 2008, Las Vegas, NV
  
  This presentation builds on the recent Web 2.0 presentation to the New England Society of Association Executives in Boston.
• The Website / AMS / CMS Puzzle, a case study and panel discussion of a project to implement a new AMS and website simultaneously at WTS International. The event is co-sponsored by American Technology Services, WTS, Protech and Lehman Associates. March 5, 2008, 9-11am. Registration is limited. Registration and Information
• Inclusion Marketing: While association marketing has much in common with marketing in for-profit companies, there are fundamental differences that are critical to understand. The approach to the marketplace is quite different. We refer to the difference as Inclusion versus Exclusion Marketing.