Thursday a panel at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco explores an important question for anyone building or participating in a website premised on collaboration among users — Creating a Culture of Sharing — maximizing collaboration and minimizing conflict and other costs.

This is an important question not only for entrepreneurs and communities, but for the commons generally — the success of which depends significantly on the vibrancy of sites where the commons is built. So I’m happy to participate on this panel with representatives of two such sites — Jack Herrick of wikiHow and Emily Richards of ArtisTech Media (which has run ccMixter since last year). The panel will be moderated by Josh Crandall of Netpop Research, which conducted a study on noncommercial use with Creative Commons last year.

Previewing the panel, the Web 2.0 Expo blog has published an excellent interview with Jack Herrick, worth reading in its entirety. Excerpt:

Kaitlin: So, out with it – how do you create a “Culture of Sharing”? Or at least, what would your 1 minute elevator pitch be?

Jack: We like to call wikiHow “built to share“. And we do it three ways:

1. Build trust with your community. At wikiHow we do this via open content licensing and building and distributing our open source software.
2. Build software which enables sharing and collaboration. A common example of this is to have tools to allow others to easily republish content on other sites.
3. Walk the walk. Be accessible to your community and practice the behavior of sharing, openness that you want your community to adopt.