Like AdSense, which has given Madison Avenue executives the collective jitters, the Open Architecture Network (OAN) suggests that 2.0′s cocktail of collaborative technologies can have an equally radical influence on business and industry practices. In the case of the OAN, the industry in question is architecture.
The OAN is a free, Web-based network that’s part database of architectural projects, part design tool, and part community, and its ambitious goal is to improve the living standards of 5 billion people—a number that includes not just the 1 billion people living in abject poverty today, but the one in three people who, by 2020, will be living in slums. It’s a goal that Cameron Sinclair, the architect-cum-activist who spearheaded the site, knew could only be achieved by tapping the collective intelligence of the Web.