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early works include Vannevar Bush’s celebrated article “As We May Think” [31], which described his imagined memex system, and inspired the seminal work of both Douglas Engelbart [63] and Ted Nelson [145]. Although these works are many decades old, they lay out much of what we see in today’s internet, and reveal vistas beyond. Aside from these foundational works, my ideas about collective intelligence have been strongly influenced by economic ideas. Herbert Simon [197] seems to have been the first person to have pointed out the crucial role of attention as a scarce resource in an information-rich world. I also greatly enjoyed Michael Goldhaber’s provocative article [75] on “The Attention Economy and the Net.” Complementing this is the work of complexity theorist Scott Page demonstrating the value of cognitive diversity in group problem solving [168], and Hayek’s notion of “hidden knowledge” and the use of prices as signls to aggregate that knowledge [93]. Other influential works on related subjects include Hutchins’s detailed anthropological analysis of collective intelligence in the navigation of a ship [95], Lévy’s book on collective intelligence [124], and the stimulating collection of essays on collective intelligence recently assembled by Mark Tovey [224]. Writing from a very different point of view, David Easley and Jon Kleinberg have written a great textbook, Networks, Crowds, and Markets [59], which summarizes much of the mathematical and quantitative research on networks. Finally, I recommend Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows [35]. It asks the fundamental question, how are online tools changing the way we (individually) think? I believe Carr’s answer is incomplete, but it’s a stimulating exploration of this important question.

Open source: The best way to get informed about open source is to participate in some open source projects. You can also learn a great deal by reading over the code and discussion archives from open source projects such as Linux and Wikipedia. While writing this book I spent many happy hours doing just that, and can tell you that not only is it informative, it’s often surprisingly fun, a kind of cheap entertainment for geeks. I also recommend taking a good look at GitHub (http://github.com), which is the most important current locus for open source work. A good overview of open source is Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source [235]. Its only drawback is that it’s becoming a little dated (2004), but there is much in the book that is relatively timeless. Going even further back, there is Eric Raymond’s famous essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” [178]. Raymond’s essay is what first got me (and many others) interested in open source, and it remains well worth reading. Yochai Benkler’s insightful “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm” [12] and The Wealth of Networks [13] have strongly influenced much thinking about open source, especially in the academic community. Finally, I recommend Ned Gulley and Karim Lakhani’s fascinating account [87] of the Mathworks programming competition.

Limits to collective intelligence: Informative summaries are Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia [212] and James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds [214]. Classic texts include Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, and since reprinted many times [130], and Irving Lester Janis’s Groupthink [99]. Of course, a considerable fraction of our written culture deals, directly or indirectly, with the challenges of group problem solving. Among the more formative accounts for me were Ben Rich’s Skunk Works [184], Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb [183], and Robert Colwell’s The Pentium Chronicles [45]. A little further afield, Peter Block’s book Community: The structure of belonging [18] contains many insights about the problems of building community. And, finally, Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities [98] is a superb account of how very large groups tackle a core human problem: how to make a place to live.

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