Many of the collaborative intelligence concepts under discussion in this module are closely related: Crowdsourcing relies on distributed intelligence, for example, and if the goal is education-related then the resulting community could be an example of a community of practice, or (depending on the context) peer-to-peer learning. I want to examine a specific example of what I think is a beautifully managed community of practice at the nexus of the wiki/collaboration tools, distributed intelligence, and communities of practice concepts; one that has reshaped how an entire industry operates: StackOverflow.

In the field of software engineering, one major problem is that tools change so quickly, and there are so many interactions between them, that for a working software developer the idea of any conventional documentation source that can encompass all of the questions he/she is likely to encounter when working on a daily basis is impossible. Even a wiki-style model such as used by Wikipedia is inadequate; Wikipedia relies on a relatively small number of core contributors who are subject matter experts in a given field, and while it can adapt itself quite quickly to changing events, the overwhelming majority of its content is static.

In contrast, a working developer might encounter a rarely- or never-before-seen quirk in the interaction between two obscure software tools; there might not be anything on the entire internet that addresses the problem, and the developer can't afford to wait hours or days for a help-line response.

StackOverflow solves this problem with a set of tools that encourage and facilitate collaboration between many (sometimes it seems like all) members of the global software community. Its profile system awards reputation points and badges, which in turn award priviledges (such as the ability to vote on community issues, post comments, flag posts, etc.).

Since the site has become such an important collaborative tool in the industry, some employers will actively look at an applicant's StackOverflow profile to see what contributions they have made; this means that it is in many working developers' interests to actively answer questions on the site. And since the greatest reputation gains are to be had by posting the best and most thorough answer (as voted by other users), there are strong incentives to provide quality content. The result is that within minutes of asking a question, most posters can expect multiple answers from professional or amateur software engineers; they can choose and accept the best answer, which then remains on the site as a reference. The first search engine result for many, many software-related questions is a StackOverflow post; the archive alone is an invaluable resource in day-to-day work in the field.

Even more importantly, if the situation described in a question is unique, the inline comments system, combined with supplementary tools such as JSFiddle and Codepen, encourages a group of coders to work out the problem collaboratively in real-time until an answer is found, posted, and submitted. Again, the resulting answer remains in the archive as a resource.