Category Archives: X-Culture Stories
Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.
by Vas Taras Open-source collaboration and crowd sourcing – the principles at heart of X-Culture – have already changed a number of industries. Conspicuously, however, business research, education, and consulting are stuck in the “do it in the house” paradigm. We think we can change that. It would make sense to first share how X-Culture started. It’s…
Exceeding All Limits
COMING SOON X-Culture handles an enormous amount of email correspondence. Our email accounts (admin@X-Culture.оrg and v_tаrаs@uncg.edu) must be more internationally connected emails in the world. I am not exaggerating. On a given day, each account receives 200-300 emails from an average of 25-30 countries. And at least once a week, we sent out about 10,000…
Garbage In, Garbage Out
COMING SOON X-Culture collects immense amounts of data. Over 2,000 variables. Multi-Level. Multi-Source. Multi-Method. Longitudinal. We have weekly surveys of all X-Culture participants. However, much of it is self-report questionnaires. As we learned the hard way, self-report questionnaires are tricky. It’s not that people intentionally lie. But the threat to validity of the data posed…
Free-Riding (a.k.a., social loafing, shirking, WETing, free-loading)
COMING SOON The biggest, and really only real problem in team-based projects is free-riding. It happens always and a lot. Studies show that up to 30% of all team members, regardless of age, profession, or compensation, work less than expected by their team. In X-Culture, we started off with the usual free-riding rate of about…
The Brief History of X-Culture Certificates
COMING SOON What can be easier than print a certificate? Well, designing, printing, and distributing X-Culture Certificates has been a major hassle. The evolution of X-Culture certification process is worthy a separate book. When I find a few minutes, I’ll tell you all about the challenges we faced, the solutions we developed, the problems that…
How it all started
COMING SOON None of this was planned. None of this came from a grand vision. All a product of serendipity. Lucky incidents, which looked like problems first, but turned out to be great opportunities. Give me a few days and I’ll tell you how it all started: X-Culture, WikiDemix, VirtualTA, the Coaching Program, Hackathon, and…
X-Culture Vision: Industries We Could Change
COMING SOON It appears large-scale collaboration, open-source research and crowd sourcing – the principles at heart of X-Culture, have already changed a number of industries. The largest accommodation provider owns no hotels (Airbnb) The largest taxi service provider owns no cars (Uber) The largest retailers have no stores (Alibaba, Amazon) The largest video entertainment provider owns no…
WHY THIS BLOG
by Vas Taras A few years ago, I started what is now known as X-Culture. It was a very simple idea, but unexpectedly (though not without tens of thousands of hours of work), it has become something big – and continues to grow. Big not only in terms of the number of people it is affecting –…
What is a Leader?
The “Elephant” Chart Explains Why Many Hate Globalization
Although globalization has greatly benefited many people around the world, it hurt a lot one particular class of people. The “elephant” chart below shows who benefits and who is hurt by globalization. Globalization greatly increased income of: