Author: JP

Mea culpa.

Usually I read The Edge. As with First Monday, it is one more place on the web that I go to in order to find things that challenge me, that teach me, that stop me from seeping slowly into inertia.

But for some reason, probably sheer forgetfulness, I subscribed to First Monday from the get-go, but not to The Edge.

So it took Steven Levy and Newsweek, via an article headlined Mao’s Revenge,(for some reason the online version is headlined Poking a Stick Into the Hive Mind to alert me to Jaron Lanier‘s essay last May, on Digital Maoism. I find it hard to figure out why I didn’t see anything about it anywhere else, given the importance of the debate and the nature of the participants in that debate. So mea culpa again.
Two asides. One, I couldn’t resist linking Lanier’s name to his wikipedia entry; there is an imp in every one of us :-). And two, what I am doing is itself a departure from the Information is Power mindset of old. I am meant to keep these sources to myself and then appear wise and learned while regurgitating stuff from my secret sources. That’s what the old model was about. Hidden sources. Privileged access. Exclusions. A sham wisdom. In the blogosphere we opensource not just our ideas but also all our sources. Because we don’t need to rely on such trickeries as hidden sources.

I need time to read through all that has been discussed, by enough luminaries to fill an Ivy League faculty and more. There’s a lot of useful stuff in there, stuff I believe some of you will enjoy digging through. So dig away.

If I haven’t finished reading it, why am I breaking from my norm and just linking to the stuff? Because it’s now in the mainstream, as a result of the Newsweek coverage, and we need to act. Collectively :-) Before the mainstream accept his view as the norm. Because they will. I can see reprints being ordered now and becoming part of every enterprise pantheon on social software. Unless we respond.
I like a lot of what Lanier usually says. But this time he brings his guns to bear on all the traditional criticisms of social knowledge and citizen media: lowest common denominator; dumbing down; propaganda; hive mentalities and drone thinking; the whole shooting match. And, sadly, he agrees with the critics. Thankfully, he too has critics, and the Edge does a good job in putting their points of view across.

Please do read it if you’re at all interested in the subject. I promise to comment in detail sometime soon, for whatever it’s worth.

Let me end by saying that any medium of expression has the capacity to be subverted into a propaganda machine. The internet is not a medium of expression, it is a place. A marketplace. Of conversations. And so it has a capacity for dissent that is unrivalled.

That’s why crowds can be wise. It is in the capacity for dissent, and the free exercising of that capacity, that collective wisdom is formed.

I am intrigued by the regular convergence of comments on aspects of social software on to a single, critical topic: The role of the expert.
Whether I look at the “quality” comments, the lowest-common denominator ones, the “dumbing down” ones or for that matter the questions on the ontology of encyclopaedias, somewhere in my head they are all the same.
It’s all about the barriers we raise about being “qualified” to be an “expert”.

Imagine a world where venture capitalists refused to fund a start-up unless the founders all had university degrees. Know any large companies founded by college dropouts? :-)

Imagine a world where you couldn’t be a musician unless you’d done your time at the right academy or ecole. Know any talented musicians who had no formal training? :-)
History is littered with examples of prodigious talent without formal qualifications. Qualifications yes. But not formal ones. The world is richer as a result.

Too often “expertise” is associated with (a) formal qualifications (b) years of experience (c) the weight of being “published” and (d) various tests for competence and ability covering intelligence and emotion and cognitive ability and what-have-you.

These are all good indicators of expertise. Some are very good indicators of expertise. But they should not be considered necessary, or, for that matter, sufficient, conditions for being considered an expert.

Know any experts who turned down the Beatles? Know any experts who said that Fred Astaire couldn’t sing or dance? Know any experts who forecast a world market for maybe five computers? Know any that did not believe that a home computer was a good idea? Or that the internet was a passing fad?  :-)

There is no magic formula for talent or for expertise. But passion and motivation and perseverance and  access/enfranchisement go a long way. Every one of us is, or can be, a student for life, and a teacher for life. We all have a responsibility to ensure that the passion and motivation are allowed to be fruitful, and for that we need to ensure open access.

Ontologies can create unnecessary anchors and frames. Subjective elements creep in whenever we try and define expertise, particularly in the study of society. Too often definitions turn out to be dinosaur defences. There is a consilience taking place, a battle between the disciplines. Let’s not behave like the monarchs and priests and doctors and lawyers, and for that matter, IT professionals, of old, did.

As I said earlier, academic qualifications and experience and publishing history and test scores are all good indicators. In many cases they are very good indicators.

But they are not the only indicators. And should not be used to raise the wrong barriers.

Many years ago I used to watch Hill Street Blues regularly (I know, I’m sad that way….). So as we enter a phase where we’re all going to participate in, learn from, implement, iterate and adopt and iterate again the right governance standards for social software, I’d like to quote Sergeant Phil Esterhaus, played by the late Michael Conrad:

Hey, let’s be careful out there.

Following the Aaron Swartz post, some of the comments and discussions I’ve seen on the web suggest that people think there is no real difference between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias, in terms of how they are produced.

This is wrong. And dangerous.

Three critical differences need to be preserved, they are key distinguishers of what makes social software “social”.

These are:

Contributor selection
Subject selection
Capacity to show dissent

In Brickipedia, the editors choose the contributors. In Wikipedia the contributors choose themselves. This is very powerful.

In Brickipedia, the editors frame and anchor the topics. In Wikipedia the contributors choose to write what they’re passionate about. Also very powerful.

In Brickipedia, there is no capacity to show dissent. In Wikipedia, dissent is visible. This is the most powerful differentiator.

Of course there is also a difference in the way Bricki and Wiki contributors get rewarded, but I feel that this is less important than the three I’ve mentioned above.

We must preserve this. Motivated people selecting themselves to write about things they feel passionate about, and able to show agreement and dissent as well.

Read Cass Sunstein on Democracy and Dissent if you’re interested, I am currently travelling and unable to point to the right references. I’m sure Google will oblige.

Following the Aaron Swartz post, some of the comments and discussions I’ve seen on the web suggest that people think there is no real difference between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias, in terms of how they are produced.

This is wrong. And dangerous.

Three critical differences need to be preserved, they are key distinguishers of what makes social software “social”.

These are:

Contributor selection
Subject selection
Capacity to show dissent

In Brickipedia, the editors choose the contributors. In Wikipedia the contributors choose themselves. This is very powerful.

In Brickipedia, the editors frame and anchor the topics. In Wikipedia the contributors choose to write what they’re passionate about. Also very powerful.

In Brickipedia, there is no capacity to show dissent. In Wikipedia, dissent is visible. This is the most powerful differentiator.

Of course there is also a difference in the way Bricki and Wiki contributors get rewarded, but I feel that this is less important than the three I’ve mentioned above.

We must preserve this. Motivated people selecting themselves to write about things they feel passionate about, and able to show agreement and dissent as well.

Read Cass Sunstein on Democracy and Dissent if you’re interested, I am currently travelling and unable to point to the right references. I’m sure Google will oblige.

I feel at ease. For once I am not confused. At least I am less confused than I was earlier.
You remember the sequence of posts I wrote about opensource and gatekeepers? [Those new to the conversation can find them here, here, here, here and here, in chronological order. Alternatively you can enter “gatekeeper” into the search box in the sidebar and get the same results. But it’s not important.]

I’ve been tracking what Aaron Swartz has been saying about Wikipedia in Raw Thought, his blog. Now why would I do this? Simple. In a strange kind of way I think that Wikipedia is the Drosophila of social software, much like a recent Scientific American article suggested that chess could be the Drosophila of cognitive science. You can measure things in Wikipedia, conduct experiments, analyse what’s happening, predict results, compare actuals against predictions. Wikipedia provides the nearest thing to a live laboratory for the study of social software. For now, anyway.

In a recent post, headlined Who Writes Wikipedia, Swartz has some interesting analysis of what happens there. I quote from the post:

• Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”
  

They expected to find an extreme Pareto Law in operation. They looked for it. And they were not disappointed. They found it.

There were critics of the findings, who felt that counting the raw number of edits was not a useful indicator, that there should be a measure related to that which was created, the body text. [Notice I didn’t say Content. Bad word.] And Wales indicated this would happen over time.

When I first heard this, I couldn’t get my head around the Pareto-versus-Long-Tail tension. Surely Wikipedia should behave Long-Tail rather than Pareto? And Wisdom-Of-Crowds Emergence surely cannot depend on a small gatekeeper fraternity, because that is hard to scale? But I’m used to the gatekeeper mentality, so I just stayed quiet. And confused.

Swartz was curious, and did a little bit of homegrown investigation. Here are his early observations:

• Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that’s not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.

So there was some reason to look at what the critics (of the original findings) were saying. Maybe analysis at number-of-edits level was not particularly useful; maybe the amount of original text created would be a better yardstick.

Here’s what Swartz found, admittedly in a simple “homegrown” experiment:

• To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version. Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article.
• If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales’s methods, you get Wales’s results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.
• But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit — this one! With the more reasonable metric — indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study — the result completely reverses.

Read the article for yourself. I have no idea who Swartz is, never met him, never even heard of him until I decided (following the gatekeeper debate) to try and understand what makes Wikipedia tick. That’s all.
One swallow does not make a summer. Swartz’s findings are based on a relatively small sample; and whenever you study anything remotely connected with society, there is a high risk that you bring in cultural bias and what Stephen Jay Gould called Reification (in The Mismeasure of Man). I am not, therefore, suddenly extrapolating Swartz’s findings into a resolution of the MidEast crisis.
What I am doing is sharing those findings with you. They support Wisdom of Crowds. They support Emergence. They support micromarkets and microbrands. They support Long Tail rather than Hit Culture. They support markets being conversations. All these are about people and relationships and access and empowerment, but in different fields and with different perspectives.
And most importantly, they suggest that the success of social software is based on everyone doing something about whatever it is they are passionate about. Everyone. Passion.

There’s an important principle in there somewhere, which (I hope) will be borne out by more intensive and formalised study:

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are indeed shallow….provided there is code to look at. The value starts with the created output, not with the bug.
Gatekeepers can and should be eyeballs that help us all remove bugs and improve the pool of ….code….information….ideas….whatever.

What worried me about gatekeepers, something I could not articulate well before this, was the ability of the gatekeepers to restrict creativity. Particularly when we are yet to grow out of the Blame Culture and Hierarchy and Command and Control.

Without creativity there is nothing, no shallow bugs, no bugs, no nothing. Nothing.

Let’s not forget that as we experiment with, build, adapt and evolve governance models for social software.

To put it in Swartz’s words:

• Even if all the formatters quit the project tomorrow, Wikipedia would still be immensely valuable. For the most part, people read Wikipedia because it has the information they need, not because it has a consistent look. It certainly wouldn’t be as nice without one, but the people who (like me) care about such things would probably step up to take the place of those who had left. The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around.
  

The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way round. Great stuff.