ONU Professor Among Co-authors of First 'Crowdsourced' Textbook

Dr. Paul Govekar, assistant professor of management in Ohio Northern University's James F. Dicke College of Business Administration, has co-authored "Management through Collaboration: Teaming in a Networked World," which is scheduled to be published in 2010. Pre-publication copies are available for instructor review.

The introductory management textbook contains contributions from more than 100 different authors and is the world's first to explore the possibilities of collaborating via electronic networking tools.

The idea for the book was conceived by Dr. Charles Wankel of St. John's University in New York. Gathering together a group of scholars at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management and other academic meetings, he organized professors and field experts into "chapter groups" and asked them to contribute to a new text.

"This was an exciting project," Govekar said. "It was fascinating to work with authors from around the world to complete a project of this magnitude."

Govekar was part of the group responsible for material pertaining to the history of management thought. A group of authors collaborated on each chapter based on subject expertise and contributed to the text by setting up online Wiki spaces, resulting in the idea of a "crowdsourced" book.

Published: Fri, 09/11/2009 - 10:55am