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January 2, 2007

Role Your Own

Note to Sun Microsystems: now, the network is the producer.

Increasingly we read that the new books of importance will be written collaboratively and, in fact, will be Wiki-ed.

Aside from inciting thoughts about the demise of Books 2.0 (remember when Scrolls 3.0 was crushed by Books 1.0?), what are we to make of this?

Well, blending what we generally think about wikis and books, this news presumably heralds the rebirth of the Collective Wisdom.

Or not.

Proof? It was fairly predictable that Wikipedia's own founder would eventually rate it a failure. But it wasn't because people couldn't use it; it was because it was mis-used.

If the "open to all" offering of the production approach is merely a free-for-all, then all bets are off. To understand what is most likely to happen, someone who cares will need to know and cultivate what the real profile of the group effort ought to be, as detectable by the terms of the framework here. In the simplest terms, one should be able to put an "X" in the boxes that distinguish the nature and objectives of the group effort, and leave the other boxes empty, and tell everyone the same story:

Otherwise, one of two things will likely take over-- .the fatigue of herding cats, or the natural inclination towards entropy.

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By the way, due to laziness and working solo, "we" took a really long time with this article, during which Infoworld coincidentally arrived with a more conventional but important review of Wikis. Click it up now, or come back to it afterwards, as you like.
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I.

For the general populace in-the-know, things are still new enough so that when one says "wiki" it likely means the real branded thing -- dubya3 dot wikisomething dot xyz. But already, we can safely say "wiki" the way we say "kleenex".

It's what happens with all perfect products: we didn't know we needed it until we got it, and now we can't live without it -- so we talk about it in an absolute or archetypal sense, and, we don't use upper case.

In saying "wiki", most people already could, and might as well, really mean any of fifty different but similar online-powered production collectives -- whether fragrance free, textured, twin ply or whatever -- instead of only authentic Wikispots. For most people, the obscure technical diffentiations of the exact underlying brand of technology are unimportant: the main attraction is always the same -- functional collaboration. Collaboration is hot.

What we still have to worry about, though, is that "functional" part -- the part that gets wisdom out of the collective. Understanding the nature of the collective is more work than many care to worry about. Working together has never been more convenient; but is it a community, a workshop, a studio, an archive, a marketplace, or what? In other words, how is the collective managed?

As for the big rebirth, let's curb our enthusiam... It isn't proven yet that wiki wisdom is superior to any predecessors - it simply collects a hell of a lot faster.

II.

That might be cool, but inevitable or indispensable?

Nahh. This is an option or tactic, not a sure thing. Being online facilitates a higher speed of cooperation, but if you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter how fast you get there. As for being indispensable, if you don't know any happy people who do not use and do not need a wiki, then you should get a bigger life than the one you have.

If you want to be a contributor yourself, though, life is good; wikis make donating easy. Now, that irresistable urge to share is covered.

Still, we can't assume that the effort to contribute to the production will wind up making the final product important. Now it's more convenient than ever to make bad stuff as well as good stuff. Meanwhile, getting a lot of bad stuff will make the novelty of this production wear thin really fast -- leaving it not much more important than anything before it.

Easy donations are just the starting line. If this is really going to work, then somehow the good stuff has to come about because of the way that the donations get handled.

Beyond the hype, the real story of the online collective is about the open-invitation supply chain versus a discriminating value chain -- when open-sourcing and authority mix in production.

III.

Deep within the cloudy buzz of collaboration, open-sourcing is the great (we believe) new extension of production mechanics. But great for whom? The null hypothesis isn't that open-sourcing is magically delicious, but that adult supervision creates collaboration from open-sourcing -- when collaboration has some specified advantage for the supervisors. It doesn't just happen by itself.

Probably the most generic form of collaboration is the workshop. Collaborative workshops, whether for making books or something else, are not new. The online part isn't even new. (Remember Compuserve?) But since we don't need collaboration to make a book, and we don't need a workshop to make a book, what the online collaborative workshop actually does of importance is bring is a workshop discipline to all comers.

IV.

Challenging that, one of the most popular supply-side notions of a collaboration is inclusiveness: the idea that anyone who can pass muster can contribute their labor to the works. While this has normally resulted, actually, in an advantage (cost) for the main producer, what's greasing the wheels on lots of the new online stuff is on the contributor side. Namely, thanks to the tools, there's not much muster to pass. For skeptics, this threatens the ambition for quality. But on the other hand, some thinkers propose the distinction "peer-production" as a way to indicate a "flatness" or absence of excessive hierarchy in the natural diversity of production roles. Is this stance a breeze of creative enlightenment, or merely political correctness? You be the judge.

Another, older spin on this flatness is the idea that the membership of a collaboration is a community gently floating in "equal rights". But that equality really applies to the benefits, not to the producing: it isn't equal opportunity. Community-based production is usually not "peer". Why not? Remember that when the producer is "the community", the community typically embraces a wide variety of roles in the production to be sure it gets what it wants, some supervisory (or "leader") and some not.

V.

With a product like a book, we also get the connotation of an outcome having quality -- here attributed to concentration of the kind from a studio. In a collaborative "studio", getting from the labor to the works -- from the acts to the results -- is not just a collaboration. It really is a study, whether it's collaborative or not. The ongoing study itself is the main point of the studio. Not a product, but a process.

Facing that fact, we'll frankly note that some people study better than others, and that the attraction of "innovation" is not necessarily a given objective of the studio. We bring this up because it might be that many people find innovation sexy and studying not sexy -- leaving an online studio with a couple of inhibitors that push many early enthusiasts into the trough of disillusionment after the initial blush of procedural simplicity. Production is not easy, whether there are hierarchies or not.

Meanwhile, even for studios that are targeting innovation, neither is collective production usually "flat" -- otherwise, we'd only need to post the old Suggestion Box, and cool things would just sprout from it into realization. (Instead, our experience is littered with stymied suggestion boxes, probably outnumbered only by dormant "collaborative" websites).

Normally, delivering value features some complexity, which confronts the ersatz participant seeking the warmth of collaborative inclusion. For example, the ongoing effort conducted by a collaborative studio typically has a topic -- like "ferrous glass" or "business-IT alignment" (or perhaps even "How To Make A Book") -- and the topic will immediately triage at least some potential participants. Then, beyond self-selection away from or towards the topic, there is generally some authority conducting a further ultimate triage. Why is this authority there? Well, for example, the benefit of participation in a studio is aimed at promoting the value of its topic; and where participation is not seen to be promoting the value of the topic, that participation gets weeded out.

VI.

As a great benefit of online contributions, exploration for "supply" is scaled up by orders of magnitude without extra cost. But if the the collective takes on any responsibility for generating groupwide benefits, then it must decide whether it wants to find value in whatever suppy it receives, or instead wants to vet the supply for its fitness to a predetermined value. That is, the responsibility of the collective is still to convert the supply into value.

Call that governance or go-to-market, the basic problem is the same.

What's interesting is that to be a community, the collective has to declare a self-interested group need for one or both of them, or else it has little claim to actually being a community. This is the authority of the community. It begins to make the gap between participation and importance fairly explicit, and weaker participants fall into the gap.

Yet these Darwinian consequences are not even the interesting part. They miss the bigger point and breakthrough of the collaborative environment. Namely, who needs community, anyway? What we really want is not community but that underlying production network, and this difference is now much more explicit due to wikis.

VII.

Having something like Wikipedia lose credibility (and thus fail it's mission) is disappointing. But the story might not be over yet, anyway. A general difference in the collectives that wikis foster is between collectives pursuing connoisseurship (quality) versus ones pursuing entrepreneurship, and a switch in direction is not out of the question.

In the case where an "online collective" commits itself to defining new value from its available content supply, the most common cycle of events is that someone in its communications network proposes the value, and the rapidly expanding acknowledgement of it creates a demand that can be met by the incredibly rapid supply of uninhibited contributors (suppliers) in the same network. And when membership in the collective does not require prequalification, the communications network expands exponentially. What isn't predetermined is who will come up with the good idea. For the source of the idea, if everyone has to agree on who has the "good" idea, it's a problem. But if the idea can simply find its own audience, then for the source it's pure opportunity.

So, for example, is there a particular need for, or interest in, Valentine's Day jokes for divorcees? Let's find out, in an online production network. The cover story here is not that these particular jokes might become a success or not, nor that the network should get seriously focused on divorcees or holidays or jokes, but instead that anyone in the network could come up with it and trigger its pursuit. Anyone in the network can now be not just a source but a producer. What's needed from the network is its natural ability to grow itself, and the ease that it offers the individual in finding a hospitable sector.

This doesn't mean that everyone should be a producer, and certainly it doesn't mean that most will be any good at it. But now the opportunity is there.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at January 2, 2007 2:07 PM

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