Digital Review of Asia Pacific — www.digitalreview.asia — aims to develop an online collaborative space and to facilitate a global community of researchers and writers in using social collaborative techniques of crowd-sourcing and generic Web 2.0 tools, for continually reviewing, analyzing, forecasting and reporting on ICT/D issues in the developing countries.
This site is built on two assumptions: (1) people with knowledge and interest, when given an essentially open arrangement to improve an interesting write-up, they will do so; (2) they will do so more, if the content is concise rather than elaborate. These stem from observed practices in crowd-sourcing over the Web.
To realize these possibilities, this site blends features and functionalities. It also adopts an emerging, still-in-research, approach: a book can be “read” from the Table of Contents in a sequence. It can be read, in principle, from the entries on the “index pages”. Another key functionality is of a basic social networking site, allowing people to gather around “chapters” or sub sections to co-create; and the more conventional functionality of forum discussions.