Production by the Masses

Daniel Pink, who I have mentioned previously on this site as I recently finished his book, A Whole New Mind, posted a very interesting post on his site:

"A group of folks at Wharton, Pearson, MIT, and Shared Insights have launched what aims to be the world's first networked business book. The venture, chirpily called We Are Smarter Than Me, will combine wiki technology and thousands of people around the world to create a management guide for a Web 2.0 world."

I think the premise is interesting as it leverages a very "hot" concept right now--the use of technology to create virtual communities and networks to organize or to collaborate on projects. We have seen this through open source software development, wikipedia, and blogging. Intelligence Organizations are even beginning to use this technology to collaborate across organizations as noted in this Washington Post article. I recently had dinner with a New York business consultant and he was discussing the idea of social networking design sites, aka wikipedia meets the fashion world. Interesting, do I trust the masses to develop software, design clothes, and catch terrorists? I am not that old but I have come across a lot of poor writing, horrendous design, and stove-piped bureaucracies!

While I do believe this collaboration is very intriguing and mass participation will lead to some very interesting ideas and concepts, I do not believe it will work in a completely open form. Ultimately, there will have to be trusted community where self-policing is the norm and not the exception. In an open form, there is no guarantee for self-policing. Wikipedia is great because it enables global collaboration and I would argue partial self-policing. I do, however, view each post with skepticism as I do not believe the proper experts in each field are vetting the information. I like these open forums for the initial facts, brainstorming, and concept development phases but ultimately you need a trusted network before reaching a final product. If I want to learn about Islam, I will check out Wikipedia first to get a sense of someone of the issues and then dive deeper into some reputable sources.

The concept of mass participation to build communities, products, and software needs to evolve past a purely open system and this is already happening. After reviewing the book web site referenced above, it appears that they have thought through a number of these issues and have developed an “Advisory Board” that will ultimately make the final decisions on which community input to accept. This is the next iteration of the open source revolution and if leveraged properly will create better products. Larry Sanger, the former co-founder of Wikipedia, is taking this concept live with his new project Citizendium. He is taking all the information from Wikipedia and having it reviewed by "experts” in the various topic areas. He states on his site, "Citizendium will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance." It will be interesting to see if people still want to participate in content development if it will ultimately be filtered by others. The story behind Sanger's departure from Wikipedia is even more interesting and is chronicled in this Atlantic Monthly article. It is clear that Sanger believes the Wikiepedia concept must include expert reviewers and this is part of the reason he was ultimately "forced" out of the community.

In the end, success with "open source" production will depend on fostering the trusted community. If I am designing a building, writing a book, or developing software, I would be happy to receive the opinions of others for the purposes of diversity but I will also build a network of designers, authors, and programmers that I trust with the final product. Maybe I have not fully grasped this “open-source” revolution but we need to balance a diverse set of ideas with those that have the experience and expertise to produce. Thoughts?

Update: There was a piece in the NY Times magazine on this issue recently as it relates to the intelligence community.