This post “A Privacy Wall Concept to make My.Gov a reality: Sometimes a wall in the information age is a good thing” is now located at OpenGovBlog.Org.
Archive for February, 2009
A Privacy Wall Concept to make My.Gov a reality: Sometimes a wall in the information age is a good thing.
February 8th, 2009The tension between obtaining participation vs collaboration.
February 2nd, 2009Thinking about KIDFAD, Surowiecki’s requirements for successful collaboration. Also his Ted talk where he questioned whether the blogosphere is a good collaboration environment.
Also thinking about communities and communities structures. Get the influencers on board, make them evangelists and you can get a lot of people participating in your social media campaign or effort.
But they are at cross purposes right? Communities offer us a structure to pass information, change standards and behavior which relies on the relationships in the communities compromising the independence of the majority of the audience. While successful collaboration requires independence of thought, decentralization and diversity of opinion.
The influencers seem entrusted by the community to think for them when it comes to certain things such as what clothes are in fashion, what car to buy, some political opinions etc? And according to the New England Journal of Medicine, how much to each and exercise.
Social media strategists prefer to obtain participation by getting communities on board (it’s easier to get a few influencers on board and let them amplify our efforts than it is to talk to everyone right?) . And its hard to imagine how mass social media efforts could work without relying on this community structure and viral spread.
But then how do we separate participation mechanisms from collaboration mechanisms, so that we can have successful collaborations with members of participating communities?
In the DARPA Grand Challenge which was a highly successful contest to create self-driven vehicles, whose 2005 winner now sites in the American History Museum at the Smithsonian, collaborations were done in small teams, whereas participation of the teams is what DARPA acheived. The mechanisms of collaboration were left up to each team.
In the case of @GeoSteph’s LRO
effort which collected 1.5 million names in 3 months to send to the moon, participation was the final goal, so in this corrupting the independence and diversity wouldn’t matter. (In other words, lets assume that the majority of participants were NASA enthusiasts which is perfectly reasonable but does limit the diversity in the group).
But how about if we want to get the public to way in on how to improve the economy, stop foreclosures, how do we invite individuals to collaborate without inviting groups to participate? Or if we invite groups to participate how do we then create a collaborative environment where they are willing to shed some of their group identity for the sake of a successful collaboration?
Is social media a KID FAD? A quick way to remember Surowiecki's requirements for successful collaboration
February 2nd, 2009In James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds he argues that for a collaboration to be successful it must have 6 elements:
Knowledge must exist in the audience
Independence of contributors
Diversity of opinion
Focused on compatible goal
Aggregation of information
Decentralized Process/Local Knowledge
I thought KIDFAD is a good way to remember since there are still people who think that is what social media is.
Not sure if he mentioned the focus on the compatible goal explicitly but I thought it was implicit in his argument. What I mean by compatible is that the individual goal must line up with the purpose of the aggregation. So in prediction markets, the win of the individual is compatible with the market obtaining an accurate prediction, because the determinant of the win is the same as the goal of the market (accurate prediction).
In the case of google mining the behavior of searches, it is reasonable to presume that individual searches want to find what they are looking for quickly and the purpose of the search engine is to provide it.
Anyway it helps me remember, hope it helps you.
