• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 367 0

amount of attention to devote to the collaboration. That limits the volume of contributions to the collaboration that any one participant can pay attention to. To scale up the collaboration while respecting this limitation, the online tools must establish an architecture of attention that directs each participant’s attention where it is best suited—that is, where they have maximal comparative advantage. Ideally, the collaboration will achieve designed serendipity, so that a problem that seems hard to the person posing it finds its way to a person with just the right microexpertise to easily solve it (or stimulate further progress). Conversational critical mass is achieved, and the collaboration becomes self-stimulating, with new ideas constantly being explored. In the next chapter, chapter 4, we’ll see many collaborative patterns that can help achieve these ends, including:

• Modularizing the collaboration, that is, figuring out ways to split up the overall task into smaller subtasks that can be attacked independently or nearly independently. This reduces barriers to entry by new people, and thus broadens the range of available expertise. Modularity is often difficult to achieve, requiring a conscious, relentless commitment on the part of participants.

• Encouraging small contributions, again to reduce barriers to entry, and to broaden the range of available expertise.

• Developing a rich and well structured information commons, so people can build on earlier work. The easier it is to find and reuse earlier work, the faster the information commons will grow.

In chapter 5 we’ll examine the limits to collective intelligence. We’ll find that for collective intelligence to be successful, participants must be committed to a shared body of methods for reasoning, so disagreements between participants can be resolved, and do not cause permanent rifts. Such a shared body of methods is available in fields such as chess, programming, and science, but not always in other fields. For example, artists may be fundamentally divided over basic aesthetic principles. Such divisions will prevent collaboration from scaling up, and so prevent designed serendipity and conversational critical mass.

How Online Collaboration Goes Beyond Conventional Organizations

Using collective intelligence to solve problems is not new. Historically, groups have used three main ways to solve creative problems: (1) large formal organizations, such as the hundreds or thousands of people who may be involved in creating a movie, say, or a new electronic gadget; (2) the market system; and (3) conversation in small informal groups. In the remainder of this chapter we’ll investigate how online tools can take us beyond these three existing ways of doing group problem solving.

To understand how online collaboration goes beyond conventional organizations, consider a movie production. A modern blockster movie may employ hundreds or even thousands of people—the 2009 movie Avatar employed 2,000 people. But unlike the participants in Kasparov versus the World or the Polymath Project, each employee has their own assigned role in the production. An employee in the movie’s art department won’t usually give advice to a violin player in the orchestra. Yet that’s exactly the kind of decision making that happened in Kasparov versus the World. Recall the critical move number 26 suggested by Yasha. In movie terms, it was as though an unknown stranger had wandered on set, made a crucial suggestion to the director, completely changing the course of the movie, and then wandered off.

Of course, there are such stories in the movies. Actor Mel Gibson got his big break when a friend who was auditioning for the movie Mad Max asked to be driven to the audition. Gibson wasn’t auditioning, but had gotten into a brawl at a party the night before, and had bruises all over his face. The casting agent decided that was the look the movie needed, and Gibson was invited back, completely changing the movie, and launching him on the path to international stardom.

In the world