b l a s t u l a reblog++

Following a theme here, I also like the distinction made between crowdsourcing and citizen science by Yale-based astrophysicist and Galaxy Zoo founder Kevin Schawinski:

“We prefer to call this [Galaxy Zoo] citizen science because it???s a better description of what you???re doing; you???re a regular citizen but you???re doing science. Crowd sourcing sounds a bit like, well, you???re just a member of the crowd and you???re not; you???re our collaborator. You???re pro-actively involved in the process of science by participating.”

On comparisons between Galaxy Zoo and seti@home, stardust@home, etc., etc., etc.:

“Galaxy Zoo volunteers do real work. They’re not just passively running something on their computer and hoping that they???ll be the first person to find aliens. They have a stake in science that comes out of it, which means that they are now interested in what we do with it, and what we find.”

On the application of wikinomics to astrophysics:

???It’s a new way of doing science. Mass collaboration makes things possible that were impossible before, mostly because of the size of our data sets. You can analyze a data set with hundreds or perhaps thousands of objects by yourself or with a small team. But if the question you want to answer involves millions of images or objects then there is really only one answer to this question: public participation.”

This interview, btw, was in my top five for 2008.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Anthony D. Williams


reBlogged

on Feb 9, 2009, 10:04PM

Originally by Anthony D. Williams from Wikinomics on February 9, 2009, 11:04pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

(note: you can see the original post here).

For the last few weeks I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Keynesian “Paradox of Thrift“, which has become particularly relevant in today’s turbulent economy. As everyone knows by now, one of the driving forces of the problems revealed in 2008 was that consumers took on too much debt. The natural anecdote for this is for consumers to stop borrowing, and start saving - but that’s where the paradox lies. If everyone does that, aggregate demand will fall, the economy crashes, and the savings rate falls further still (also noting that when one saves by putting money in bank, it has to become debt for someone else in order to earn interest). Thus, we have a problem.

So it’s a case where doing what looks like the right thing for the long-term success of the economy has some perilous implications - at least in the short-term. In turn, it got me thinking about whether there is a similar, and potentially much larger, “Paradox of Wikinomics” as well. What I mean by this is that while application of the wikinomics principles might appear to?? be the right thing for many companies and industries acting in their own self-interest, everyone adopting them at once could have similarly dire consequences - again, at least in the short-term.

In order to explain, let’s start again (also used in the wisdom of crowds vs. uniquely qualified minds post) with the first story in the book - GoldCorp. The gist was that the company ran a contest to find the best methods for identifying gold on their property, to great success. In theory, the methods they identified are probably the best for many such potential mines around the world. A logical extension would be that there are probably thousands upon thousands of people employed trying to discover ore deposits, that might very well now be redundant, if all similar companies adopted such approaches - transparency, information sharing, etc. - simultaneously. The old model, while less “efficient”, created more jobs.

So fine - one small subset of workers in the world potentially losing their jobs would barely cause a ripple in the global economy. But as you extend the principle of what made the GoldCorp story a success to other industries, such job loses can pile up. Other ideagoras (like Innocentive) would be an easy example, as companies start only paying for successful results (and a winner-takes-all economy takes hold) in R&D, while numerous people can no longer earn a living. But on a much larger scale, transparency and information sharing within the enterprise could make an extraordinary number of jobs redundant - jobs companies might be less resistant to cutting in the current economic climate than before. One easy example is “white collar grunt work” replaced by more effective, collaborative technologies - but there are many others.

And it of course doesn’t stop there. We’re already witnessing the demise of many newspapers, with the hyper-efficient Craigslist model being held responsible by many people. While I’m confident that the creation and dissemination of news will figure itself out again in the long run (and check out this excellent Clay Shirky interview for more thoughts on this), we’re seeing tremendous pressure on all creators of content tied to an advertising supported model. As the popularity of social media continues to increase, I expect that this trend will continue - and a lot of current jobs will be threatened.

I could go on, but I think you get my point by now. In the long run, what drives the wealth and success of an economy is productivity and efficiency. In my opinion, many of the principles of wikinomics continue to hold the promise of an extraordinary amount of efficiency and productivity to be unleashed, which should/ could have amazing long-term benefits. But in the short to medium term, I see the potential for a very difficult paradox - what makes the economy more efficient and productive as a whole causing a major dislocation of workers, who as we all know are also the consumers, and as they have less to spend the economy potentially shrivels up in a way similar to the paradox of thrift.

Given that the tagline of wikinomics is that mass collaboration changes everything, this dislocation could be on such a scale to make it a much tougher paradox to deal with. In such a case, the challenge is to ensure that the wave of innovation that can be unleashed through applying the wikinomics principles creates enough economic growth, and jobs, to compensate - and make sure the displaced workers can be re-trained to do them.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Denis Hancock


reBlogged

on Jan 6, 2009, 7:47PM

Originally by Denis Hancock from Wikinomics on January 6, 2009, 8:47pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

Edge.org recently posted a collection of 151 thoughts from leading thinkers on the ???game-changing scientific ideas or developments??? they think will ???change everything??? within their lifetimes. Having co-authored a book about how mass collaboration will change everything I was particularly intrigued by their answers.

There are many good entries, but artist, composer and producer Brian Eno???s short piece really struck a chord, mostly because it made me question some of the fundamental assumptions underlying our assertion that mass collaboration is not just a new business model that harnesses openness and participation; it???s a fundamentally new model of human organization and a new way to orchestrate our collective ingenuity to address the growing number of global challenges that may well overwhelm our traditional institutions.

Eno???s premise is that the game-changing development is more of a feeling than an idea???a creeping and insidious feeling that the world is getting worse rather than better, that the Earth???s natural capital is being pillaged rather than replenished, that war is more fruitful than peace, that your neighbor is more likely your rival than your friend. In this new world, fear, secrecy and mistrust reign. They replace optimism, openness and social cohesion as our dominant social operating principles. We will have reached the end of progress and then perhaps even the end of civilization.

The implication is that an end to optimism and a return to baser instincts would annihilate the conditions that make wikinomics possible–conditions such as high levels of social trust, a culture of openness and idea sharing, a deeply-ingrained sense of entrepreneurialism, not to mention a healthy dose of leisure time.

Here’s an excerpt from Eno:

Many of us grew up among the reverberations of the 1960’s. At that time there was a feeling that the world could be a better place, and that our responsibility was to make it real by living it. Why did this take root? Probably because there was new wealth around, a new unifying mass culture, and a newly empowered generation whose life experience was that the graph could only point ‘up’. In many ways their idealism paid off: the better results remain with us today, surfacing, for example, in the wiki-ised world of ideas-sharing of which this conversation is a part.

But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future world not in that way but instead as something more closely resembling the nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion described in Cormac McCarthy’s post-cataclysm novel The Road. What happens then?

The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don’t cohere. There isn’t time for them. Long term projects are abandoned???their payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned???not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits.?? Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right.

I think Eno provides us with some food for thought–though I’m more of an optimist than he. We probably underestimate the importance of how much our collective faith in progress and ever-increasing prosperity has shaped the way the world has evolved, particularly over the last century. Now things have hardly turned out as well as they might have, but what might have happened if that broadly accepted notion that there will be continuous improvement in the human condition was rejected in favor of much more distopian worldview? And what about the future? There is no doubt in my mind that we will need new institutions for governance if the human species is to survive the 21st century. I still think wikinomics could be part of the solution-set. But what prospect will we have to build these institutions in an environment of scarcity, conflict and mistrust.

Thanks to much social research, we know quite a bit about how people???s expectations of the future profoundly shape their behavior in the present. It???s probably time to start thinking more about how people???s behavior will change if and when our collective expectations of the future take a sharp turn for the worse. Will the spirit of wikinomics survive in harsher times? I don???t know yet. But before the world ends I???m going to enjoy giving this more thought.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Anthony D. Williams


reBlogged

on Jan 7, 2009, 4:54AM

Originally by Anthony D. Williams from Wikinomics on January 7, 2009, 5:54am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

I wouldn’t consider myself a tree hugger or environmentalist by any means. However I do see their point. I bent my bike tire the other day and when I had it fixed I discovered it was twenty dollars cheaper to buy an entirely new bike. Oh, speaking of bikes and natural resources, I don’t ride mine these days for the exercise.

This waste is affecting business as well but going green isn’t the only problem keeping CEOs up at night. The list also includes:
1-    Boomers retiring, leaving an inexperienced group to take over the business
2-    Hard competition to attract and retain the new Net Gen
3-    “The need for speed”. Companies are seeking to innovate to stay ahead
4-    The need for trained workers quickly

The Eco-Patent Commons initiative that Dan Herman highlighted earlier this week demonstrates another example of businesses opening up to the masses. Crowd sourcing has leveled the playing field in research and development demonstrating that ideas don’t just come from specialists and experts. In fact, in greenbiz Julie Sammons highlights a few more initiatives that are tapping into a younger crowd.

Schools like the Presidio School of Management that has interdisciplinary teams of students work with business to solve problems. From their website: The Better World Project’s mission is: to promote public understanding of how academic research and technology transfer benefits you, your community and millions of people around the world.

What better way to attract the Net Gen then to involve them and give them a cause? Interdisciplinary teams create innovation and break through silos. Project oriented curriculum keeps students interested and gives them experience. Empower the younger crowd and somehow technology will find its way into the project.
What kind of internship program or other student programs does your company maintain? What are the students doing? What kind of relationships do you have with the local universities? To investigate this further the article gives some other valuable resources:  U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, the business portal for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and Net Impact, the professional association for socially-minded MBAs.

I’ll end with this: my university flew me out to talk with executives on Wall Street. At one of the huge Investment banks we visited they explained to us that around 80% of their interns were hired upon graduating. What does that mean? Probably an even higher portion came back asking them for a job. In the competition for talent collaboration is vital. Think about it.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Caleb Love


reBlogged

on Sep 26, 2008, 2:51AM

Originally by Caleb Love from Wikinomics on September 26, 2008, 4:51am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

While a combination of my job and a bit of intellectual curiosity leads me to devour a lot of content on the web, there is precisely one publication that I pay to have delivered to my house each week - The Economist. It’s always a special treat when one of their articles focuses on one of our regular research areas, which is just what happened last week with Following the Crowd. While much of the article covers some of the “unusual quarters” where crowdsourcing is popping up, the final few paragraphs focus on the perceived limitations and/or challenges.

I want to particularly focus on the last one, which is in relation to Cambrian House (CH). Following a brief discussion about why crowdsourcing and commerce “make uneasy bedfellows”, the article leads into the CH story with “And even those companies that do try to share the proceeds from commercial crowdsourcing are not safe.” Noting that the CH model of encouraging people to send in ideas for new software products, have the community evaluate them, and fund the winners sounded like a good idea, the article then mentions that the chief executive acknowledged that the business model failed.

I assume they’re referring to the comment that CEO Michael Sikorsky made on this TechCrunch article about CH’s failure in May. If you look at his explanation, Michael brings up one particularly interesting reason for the problems CH - “… most of the heavy lifting kept falling back on us, or a few select members of the community. A vicious cycle was created leading all of us to get more and more diffuse… Hence: the wisdom of the crowds worked well in the model, but it was our participation of crowds aspect which broke down.”

But here’s the thing - if you look back on the history of crowdsourcing models, the heavy lifting almost always falls back on a “few select members of the community”. We’ve seen this with Digg, Wikipedia, and a myriad of others - some sort of hierarchy is almost certain to emerge in a crowdsourcing platform, and within this hierarchy a relatively small group of people will do most of the heavy lifting.

In turn, what I’m saying here is that CH shouldn’t have been surprised by this, nor should they have seen it as a business model failure. That was what history indicated would happen. Moreover, as companies start blending crowdsourcing with commerce (i.e. bringing in direct financial incentives), one would expect that it would amplify the effect - and the strategy for the company should have been designed accordingly. This would indicate the Economist’s tongue in cheek final sentence might have some merit - “Perhaps it should have crowdsourced the management of the company, too?”

That’s not to say it would have neccesarily worked, however. This challenge of blending crowdsourcing with commerce is still in it’s infancy, and there is a lot of collective learning to be done - history also tells us that failure is an important part of the innovation process. I think it will be one of our more interesting research topics over the next little while. Right now, I’d agree with the Economist that they’re uncomfortable bedfellows, but somebody is going to figure it out sometime - and might that somebody be VenCorps, who acquired the CH assets in May?

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Denis Hancock


reBlogged

on Sep 11, 2008, 12:18PM

Originally by Denis Hancock from Wikinomics on September 11, 2008, 2:18pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

Economic theory suggests that the workings of a market can become more efficient with the increase in available information. Essentially this means that a price differential between similar goods can not persist if all customers that have access to the good are aware of it.

Price comparison sites such as NexTag, BizRate, Shopzilla and Yahoo! Shopping already help users find the best deals by comparing retailers. However, most of these sites only include prices from online sources as opposed to physical stores. Some physical retailers have begun to put their inventory and price information online, however, comparison between them is usually cumbersome. (Not to mention the frequent inaccuracies)

Other forays into the physical world include Craigslist and eBay mashups which place real-estate, used cars and other goods on a map. These services are excellent in helping people locate things, but do little to make the markets for similar goods more efficient. Japan is one of the countries ahead of the curve. A shopper can use their mobile phone to scan QR codes on items like books and compare them to online retailers such as Amazon.

Perhaps the best example of sharing useful information on physical goods is GasBuddy.com, a website that compiles gas prices in the U.S and Canada. Volunteers text or go online to enter prices for gasoline and diesel at fuel stations in their area. The work of thousands of volunteers creates a price map that can be accessed online or though a mobile phone. Although this is unlikely to equalize gas prices across the country, local differences are less likely to persist. The maps also give analysts and regulators a better picture of the differentials across the country.

As the internet, and increasingly mobile technologies, allow people to compile information on various goods and services, the pricing power will slowly shift from sellers to buyers. Buyers in a given area essentially begin to act as one. This shift could have a profound effect on the retail industry.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Paul Artiuch


reBlogged

on Sep 12, 2008, 9:40PM

Originally by Paul Artiuch from Wikinomics on September 12, 2008, 11:40pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics