How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals
Text of a speech I gave at the Handelsblatt IT Congress: “How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals.”
Here are a few bits.
… Imagine what people in your industry, or your profession, could do if very many of them were ready to get together to collaborate online, Wikipedia-style. …
What I want to talk about now is how we might organize professionals from many different companies and from many different countries to collaborate on information resources that everyone can use, presumably for free. For example, imagine an international federation of journalists getting together to exchange information and summarize ongoing news stories, so that they (and everyone else) could find the latest information about a developing story by looking in one place, rather than having to read many different articles. …
What’s really exciting to me is that a growing number of professionals are interested in exploring these possibilities. In the last two or three years I have been approached by quite a few different people and groups, from many different fields, who are interested in starting broad-based, open collaborations for different professional communities and for different purposes. …
Strong collaboration—which is made possible on a wide scale by the Internet—goes one step further. Not only are there multiple authors, and not only are those people each others’ editors, but there is no set group of people who are the authors and editors of the work. Some authors can drop out, and other authors join. In five years, you might not know any of the people maintaining a strongly collaborative work that you started. (It’s a little like the evolution of folk tunes.) …
… One of my main objections to Wikipedia is not that it is too open, or too collaborative, but simply that the system makes no special roles for experts. I think it is possible to have a very open and strongly collaborative system that has special roles for people who know a lot about a field.
In fact, that’s what I’m trying to accomplish with a new project that I first announced last September in Berlin, called the Citizendium. It’s very similar to Wikipedia, but we require that people use their own real names—no anonymous contribution—and we have expert editors who work on the wiki right alongside everyone else. These editors can approve articles, and they can make decisions about the content of articles, but they have to work with everyone else. …
So I think there are three criteria that can be used to identify particularly good candidate projects for strong collaboration. First, the project should aim at compiling information that is of interest to a lot of people. Second, it should be the sort of information that very many people regularly collect or review, duplicating each others’ effort. Third, an exhaustive repository of that information can be created only by methods of strong collaboration. If all three criteria are met, you’ve got an excellent candidate for strong collaboration. …
… What I want to do next is to give you a few thoughts on how to set up strong collaborations. …
First, what I think many people don’t often realize is that starting a collaborative project is not unlike starting a business. …
… Many people still don’t have the faintest clue about what strong collaboration looks like. They have to be taught not only how to use the software, but also some concepts of collaboration that are very unfamiliar.
For example, one of the central concepts it’s necessary to teach your participants is that, if they really do want other people to help develop information that they have added, then they have to leave their work unsigned. Placing your name on an article, for example, strongly discourages other people from working on it, even if the community rules say that others can work on it. Therefore, for maximum productivity, strongly collaborative content should be unsigned. …
Even if you set up a system and you define some reasonable rules, that doesn’t guarantee that people will actually use your system. It is absolutely essential that project organizers publicize the project and then communicate regularly with the participants, to motivate them to contribute. It’s also very important that organizers actually participate themselves. If organizers don’t participate, then it will look like they don’t really care about the project. They have to take the lead. …
I want to conclude by telling you a story, a science fiction story. What would our future look like ten years down the road, if strong collaboration among professionals were then thriving on a massive scale? It might look like this. You’ll have to forgive as I now let my imagination run wild.
“It is now the year 2017. There have been practically unimaginable amounts of information on the Internet since the early 2000s, but much of it has been of questionable quality. In recent years, however, professional collaborations have created huge amounts of reliable information, and this information is free and easy to find.
“For example, there are giant, free product databases for every industry, sponsored by industry groups and created by volunteers, which list every single product, and every bit of information publicly available about them. No longer do we have to search through different company websites; everything is collected to make shopping and choosing items from neutral sources as easy as possible. …
“In education, at the primary, secondary, and university levels, the tools of the trade have undergone a complete revolution. Because there are tens of millions of high-quality, expert-approved encyclopedia articles, students and teachers can find reliable information on every topic they study amazingly quickly. These articles are integrated with original sources, all of which are available digitally now, so that every student at a school that pays its fees can have the resources of the largest library in the world from any computer terminal. …
“It is as if we are all now plugged into the World Brain, the global super-encyclopedia that H. G. Wells once dreamed of. We are all completely immersed in a world of the best available information. Most of us no longer spend much time finding or organizing information, because that is already done for us by an international army of collaborators; we spend our time, instead, directly accessing and personally making sense of the information. Finding and navigating it is now trivial and taken for granted. …
“The profoundly easy access to every sort of information now in 2017 has made us view information less as a proprietary thing, controlled by powerful elites, and more as a shared thing, like oxygen, open to whomever is interested in it. And since there is so little friction in discovering what is known in a field, innovation has accelerated even faster than it had been in previous generations.
“But arguably the most stunning impact of the collaborative revolution has been on India, China, and increasingly, many other countries in the developing world. In every corner of the world with access to the Internet, a new Enlightenment is taking place, because the intellectuals in each different country of the world are no longer confined to their own books and magazines and the few that they are able to import from abroad. They have access to the same information as the stock broker in New York City, and the college professor at Oxford, and the computer programmer in Berlin.”