This link has been bookmarked by 67 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 Feb 2008, by Wade Roush.
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Alberto CotticaIl famoso saggio di Kevin Kelly in cui si sostiene che serve un po' di top-down in mezzo a tutto il bottom-up della rete. Interessante: Howard Rheingold viene scelto come campione della posizione "bottom-up IS enough"
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dmj_ellisWhy we'll always need editors
web2.0 complexity emergence editors hivemind psychology business
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Michel BauwensTime is what ad-hoc systems need, which we have so little of. The main drawback to pure unadulterated darwinism is that it takes place in biological time -- eons. Who has eons to wait during internet time? Nobody
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emcilveenCrowd-sourcing is evolutionary and slow, and requires top-down guidance, argues Kevin Kelly
kevin_kelly participatory_culture emergence the_lab big_here wired wikipedia writing sociology
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Adam Crowe"Time is what ad-hoc systems need, which we have so little of. The main drawback to pure unadulterated darwinism is that it takes place in biological time -- eons. Who has eons to wait during internet time? Nobody."
internet intelligentdesign emergence complexity web editing peerproduction collectiveintelligence crowdsourcing collaboration management socialdesign storygraph hivemind smartmobs wikipedia
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The reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture.
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annestI wrote a book, Out of Control, heralding the immense power of bottom up systems. You know: smart mobs, hive mind, web power, amateur hour, decentralized webs, network effects, and collaborative work. Twenty years ago Out of Control made a wide-ranging an
blog crowdsourcing design future intelligence media science toread joukkoäly control
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Suvi KorhonenParviteorian analyysiä.
collaboration complexity social wikipedia emergence wiki design editors collaborative community business blog articles article 2008
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now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it's worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.
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The reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture.
Here's how I come to that conclusion. I call myself an editor first, and author second. I think the top-down function of editors -- to select, prune, guide, solicit, shape, and guide the results from the crowd -- is essential to excellence. From the earliest days of the web, when Wired originated one of the first commercial content websites, a key unanswered question was how much influence editors should wield? In the early 1990s, adhocracy folks such my friend Howard Rheingold (whom we hired to oversee Hotwire, the online content site for Wired), argued for the editor-less crowd. I was on the side of editors.
Howard was at the forefront in the then totally radical belief that content could be assembled entirely from the collective action of amateurs and the audience. I had no doubt that a lot of good stuff could be assembled this way. But I thought of that crowd-sourced content as just the start. I believed then, and still believe now, that the role of editors -- what we might call middle people, the PSL (publishers, studios, and labels) -- were NOT going to go away. I thought that by adding a mild, smart editorial choice on top of the bottom's work, you'd have something much better. Howard believed that we'd get further faster just relying on people with strong voices, lots of passion, and the willingness to write. We'd call those bloggers now.
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My argument was that the publisher roles would change drastically, but the need for some top-down selection and guidance would only increase in value. As the amount of content expanded, the demand for some intelligent guidance and selection would be worth a lot to some people. The work of most unedited amateurs was simply not interesting or reliable enough for me.
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Wikipedia is not the only hive mind out there. There's the grand web itself, and other collective entities, such as fandoms, voting audiences, link aggregators, consensus filters, opens source communities, and so on, all basking in a rising tide of loosely connected communal action.
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But it doesn't take very long to discover -- if we look hard and honestly -- that none of these innovations is pure hive mind, and that the supposed paragon of adhocracy -- the Wikipedia itself -- is itself far from strictly bottom-up. In fact a close inspection of Wikipedia's process reveals that it has an elite at its center, (and that it does have an elite center is news to most). Turns out there is far more deliberate top-down design management going on than first appears. This is why Wikipedia has worked in such a short time.
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Time is what ad-hoc systems need, which we have so little of. The main drawback to pure unadulterated darwinism is that it takes place in biological time -- eons. Who has eons to wait during internet time? Nobody.
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Rather than try to struggle to devise waterproof bottom-up legalistic rules to keep persistent vandals from messing up articles, uber-admin Wales would simply ban them unilaterally on the advice of his elite editors. A human editor could discern much better than any rule whether the trolls meant trouble or where harmless. Saved years of wasted effort trying to tweak and tune an emergent anti-troll system.
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It is important to remember how dumb the bottom is in essence. In biological natural selection, the prime architect is death. Death powers evolutionary selection. Death is one binary bit. Either off or on. What's dumber than that? So the hive-mind of evolution is powered by one-bit intelligence. That's why it takes millions of years to do much.
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We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including Wikipedia, has design wired into it.
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It's taken a while but I think we've learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don't need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.
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More importantly, the brute dumbness of the hive mind produces the raw material that smart design can work on. If we ONLY listen to the hive mind, that would be stupid. But if we ignore the hive mind altogether, that is even stupider.
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In the realm of encyclopedias, we want totally reliable articles that are the most authoritative in the world, the most understandable in the world, and the most current in the world. We want news that is relevant, with a low noise to signal ratio. We want research reports that are unbiased but comprehensive and consistent. We want expertise.
We are unlikely to get the level of expertise we want with no experts at all.
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I know it is heresy, but it might be that the Wikipedia model is not good for very much more than writing universal encyclopedias. Other wiki projects to construct textbooks, species listings, and a search engine have not succeeded -- yet. Perhaps the article length is fortuitously the exactly right length for the smart mob, and maybe a book is exactly the wrong length. We'll see.
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Here's how I sum it up: The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think.
At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.
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The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions. Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.
The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of "everybody" (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures.
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Geoffrey Bilder"I call myself an editor first, and author second. I think the top-down function of editors -- to select, prune, guide, solicit, shape, and guide the results from the crowd -- is essential to excellence."
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Elmine WijniaReflecting on bottom-up vs. top-down
emergence swarm control bottomup topdown socialweb collaboration community complexity
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Mark PesceMore brilliance from Kevin Kelley.
hyperpeople hyperconnectivity swarm Wikipedia crowdsourcing WIRED
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13 Feb 08
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ken ."And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage.. the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well" - Wikipedia editors, pruning, selecting (banning) - "The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture"
business collaboration community complexity emergence feedback management process social swarm technology time wikipedia
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dave sgonechinaWikipedia and hive minds... 50 years later, Wikipedia could have authentication certs and various other mechanisms.
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the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.
The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions. Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.
The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of "everybody" (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures.
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