Intuit cofounder Scott Cook’s new article, The Contribution Revolution, is available in the most recent Harvard Business Review. It’s full of real-world examples that students like mine, who are poised to go into various business positions, can grab onto. And for geeks like me, it provides one of the best user contribution taxonomies out there. I’ll definitely be suggesting it when people ask me for a shorter class reading on crowdsourcing, as it is a tighter, less utopian argument than Wikinomics.

Since Intuit tends to practice what they preach, they’ve launched the companion Contribution Revolution wiki in the “hope ... that this site becomes the authoritative aggregation of knowledge and how-tos on how organizations create, foster, and benefit from user contribution systems (UCS)...because of the knowledge and experience contributed by contributors like you.” It’s already an excellent pragmatic resource, thanks largely to the efforts of Jenny Spadafora, who you might know as my co-conspirator but who actually spends most of her time thinking up stuff for Intuit Labs. (Full disclosure: I did a small amount of consulting on the wiki, mostly about platform options and textual resources.)

If you’re teaching wikis or doing corporate training in user contribution systems, this is a solid resource either in itself or for finding further readings. It’s another definite addition to my network literacy courses, and it’s also a potential writing assignment. If you were previously assigning your students to contribute to Wikipedia and have since stopped because of the contribution requirements and/or deletionist debates, this project is both more welcoming and currently has more gaps to fill.