Scott Shreeve has spent much of his career promoting open source as a way to
harvest collective intelligence. But (irritated by a description from a knocker)
he’s done a great job at defining one shining example of a network that
becomes more intelligent as more data (and nodes) get plugged into it. And that
network is a private SaaS company, AthenaHealth.

This is a great example of two of O’Reillys constituents of Web 2.0, especially
the second one:

1. Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability that
   get richer as more people use them
2. Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as
   more people use them

Now of course that control over data is in a private network. And
it’s not an open source project. but the point is AthenaHealth is using that
business positioning to add features and gets more powerful as the company adds more
clients.