Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [32]
Microcontribution
The Mathworks competition vividly illustrates a pattern that can be used to scale online collaboration: microcontribution. The most common type of entry in the MathWorks competition is an entry that changes just a single line of code in some previous entry. That’s right, someone comes in and changes just one line of code in an earlier entry—very possibly someone else’s entry!—and resubmits it as their own. The next most common type of entry changes just two lines. And so on. The result is that even though people are competing, the evolution of the leading entries looks almost like a conversation, with lots of back and forth, as the baton of leadership passes from one participant to another. It’s a creative exchange of ideas that drives gradual improvement over time, with different people contributing as best they can.
The same pattern of microcontribution is used in many online collaborations. In Wikipedia the most common edit to an article changes just a single line of that article. In Linux the most common contributions change just a single line of code. A study by two scientists at the software company SAP, Oliver Arafat and Dirk Riehle, showed that this pattern is quite general: in most open source software projects the most common change is to just a single line of code, the second most common change is to two lines, and so on. In the Polymath Project, project leader Tim Gowers asked participants to share just a single idea in each contribution, and to resist the temptation to go off and develop ideas extensively on their own.
Microcontribution lowers the barrier to contribution, encouraging more people to become involved, and also increasing the range of ideas contributed by any particular person. As a consequence it increases the range of expertise available to the collaboration. Recall Yasha, the member of the World Team who contributed the crucial move number 26. Yasha would have been lost playing Kasparov on his own. But it was very helpful, perhaps vital, for the World Team to have access to Yasha’s small contribution. Small contributions spark ideas and insight, as people share ideas that they couldn’t develop alone, but that can inspire others. If a participant in the Polymath Project or the MathWorks competition was stuck for ideas, they only needed to wait a few hours, watching for new ideas to stimulate and challenge them. Or they could dig into the archives, looking for fresh stimulation from old ideas. Microcontribution thus helps build a vibrant community, a sense that something is afoot, that progress is being made, that even when you, personally, are stymied, other people are moving things forward. Microcontribution is a powerful pattern of collaboration, in short, because the small contributions help the collaboration rapidly explore a much broader range of ideas than would otherwise be the case.
Scores as Signals to Coordinate Expert Attention
I said earlier that entries in the MathWorks competitionre scored automatically as soon as they’re submitted, but I glossed over how that’s done. Imagine you’re one of the competition organizers, and one of the competitors has just submitted their program. How should you score it? The obvious thing to do (and the way it’s actually done) is to run the program on a few test inputs. You might try it out on (say) three test inputs: the Beatles catalog, a collection of jazz pieces, and a collection of dance music. So on the first run the program would attempt to fill a CD with songs chosen from the Beatles catalog, on the second run it would use songs from the jazz collection, and on the third run songs from the dance collection. You’d then give the program a score determined both by how quickly the program runs and