Notes:
Collaborative development originated in the open source community and can be seen in full force on sites like Sourceforge. It was Linus Torvalds who made the observation that Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow when commenting on the quality of open source software. It is this law that protects the Wikipedia from mischief to a large extent. You don't become the committer on an open source project overnight. You have to prove yourself by regular contributions to the project. Thats how you gain trust and ascend the meritocracy. eBay uses a similar trust model to rank buyers and sellers. Again, open source community was among the first to let users drive feature sets, report and prioritize bugs recognizing that user involvement led to more valuable products.