Current knowledge sharing is done independently by millions of creators / publishers and thousands of aggregators (including traditional media organizations). Each of these publishers and aggregators compete against each other for audience. This practice breeds sensationalism (click bait, audacious headlines), speed (which affects accuracy), and leads to entrenched division ("us vs them").

Additionally, the current "production model" of knowledge is primarily linear with final outputs (an article or publication). Similar to assembly lines, this process requires a final "customer" at the end of the process. This puts the onus of curation on individual consumers who need to navigate multiple sources and increases the power of search engines and social media platforms as effective "discovery" engines.

Platforms have become dominant in markets because they offer an alternative to the pipeline production model that is more efficient, faster, scaleable, and less expensive. Rather than a linear process, it's a circular process that connects stakeholders across the value chain.

Collaborative ecosystems have the same benefits of a platform, where organizations and entities add value through the ongoing curation and evolution of knowledge from multiple, connected sources. The difference is that in an ecosystem, the platform does not extract value, it distributes it. Much like a living biosphere, this model distributes the roles of creation, production, distribution, and consumption along with the resulting value, control, and trust.