A Million Minds Are Better Than One
The science section of today’s New York Times highlights an organization called InnoCentive that seeks to solve the most challenging problems by inviting a large number of people from different walks of life to participate in the process. The article, If You Have a Problem, Use Incentive to Ask Everyone, describes the process of crowdsourcing as a way to encourage innovation and outside-the-box-thinking:
The process, according to John Seely Brown, a theorist of information technology and former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, reflects “a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to participating” enabled by the interactivity so characteristic of the Internet. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name from open-source software in which the source code, or original programming, is made public to encourage others to work on improving it.
The trick, of course, is to structure the process appropriately.
A tremendous breakthrough occurred during the middle of the 20th Century when two metaphors emerged in the physical sciences:
The new understanding, a foundation of information science, was that the form of physical structures can be understood as abstract representations and that they could be conceptualized as having an inherent “potential” which physicists call potential energy. So it became possible to think of information as the structure of energy and the potential work that energy could do in its current configuration.
What does this have to do with crowd-sourcing? Everything. You see, it is not sufficient to simply stand above the masses with a megaphone and ask questions. The potential work that the community is capable of will be influenced considerably by the structure of the community. So, for example, there needs to be an easy and cheap way for people to communicate with each other if ideas are to be exchanged. The internet provides considerable structure to communications with its myriad pathways and low cost routes for shipping snippets of thought.
There also exists a creativity potential through the contexts of interaction that shape what the situation means to participants. This is evident in scenes of genius (called “scenius” by some, as I’ve written earlier) where the context plays a vital role in shaping the inspiration of people who linger around. The “structure” of this component is immanently cultural and may be difficult to extract by emphasizing the material environment in isolation from its conceptual landscape.
Care needs to be taken in building the right kind of community if crowd-sourcing is to succeed. Structure is vital in this process and should not be overlooked.
I am optimistic that crowds can solve our biggest problems. Ultimately, the solutions to our climate crisis, energy needs, and sagging economy will be shaped by the technologies of social organization. Figuring out the best ways to organize ourselves will be challenging work, no doubt about it. We’ll need to depend upon existing structures - like the internet - to transform the pooling of effort into success.
Hi Joe,
I think a lot of us in the ‘inter-toobz’ are feeling a really lot frustrated. There are so many issues that need attention, and in spite of all the social interaction specific sites, issue advocacy sites, and every other thing sites, what I see is the breakdown of your very caution in that the structure must be handled carefully.
There are millions of us trying to get all kinds of things done, but unfortunately, we are trying to apply the old ‘box’ to the new situation.
So how do you take the theory you have just espoused, and put it into practical use? The most able groups (MoveOn, the Obama campaign) have a millio or two members - which sounds impressive until you think about the fact that the country has 300 million citizens (I realize some of those are babies and little kids!) Al Gore’s new WE campaign has over a million people who signed up on the new website. But so far - there are a lot of the same old ways of ’sign up here, we’ll send you a newsletter, we’ll let you have a blog, send us money’ and that’s pretty much the end of it.
Even when the FISA Amendment was going through, several well-known political blogs (FDL, Salon, etc) joined up and raised a bunch of money. But they wound up spending it running ads against several congress people after the fact! Not much productive work IMHO.
So, to recap - I’m really interested in how you take a theory like this and translate it into action. How do you define or ‘construct’ the structure? What happens next?