Citizendium Blog

Here’s something I cut from an essay I’m working on — but it stands on its own as a mini-essay.

The world is amazed by what global, self-selecting groups can do collaboratively — so much so that “You” are Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.”  But few have considered, or anyway taken seriously, the ideas of requiring the use of real names, absolutely insisting on professional standards of behavior, and giving collaborative projects some gentle expert oversight.  To suggest that it is feasible to add these innovations — quite radical innovations, really, by Web 2.0 standards — is tantamount to suggesting that we can secure the stunning productivity of Web 2.0 without suffering the common ills of irresponsibility, obnoxious behavior, and mediocrity.  That is precisely the proposition on which the new Citizendium effort rests.  We are Web 2.0 with real names, fairly enforced rules, and a role for experts.

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Text of a speech I gave at the Handelsblatt IT Congress: “How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals.”

Here are a few bits.

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We’ve decided to change the pilot project application procedure, particularly for authors. Authors are no longer required to have CVs/resumes or supporting Web links–but they are required to supply us with a bio which we will put on their user pages.

This is going to let a few people in who weren’t able to get in before. Here are the instructions.

Sorry no update for a while. That’s not because there’s no news, we’re just very nose-to-the-grindstone. Work on the wiki continues nicely. But the big news actually is that we’ve settled on an initial set of editorial workgroup topics. Now we just need to create forums for the workgroups. We’re also going to get going on major recruitment soon.

Through working as a Personnel Administrator (along with Sarah Tuttle, Ruth Ifcher, and Freddie Salsbury) and helping field some of email Citizendium receives, I’ve had a chance to watch some of the talent joining the pilot project. We’ve gotten some really fantastic applications- both in terms of sheer expertise and of enthusiasm for the project mission. I think the users (Citizens?) that are joining the project will be a great core group to help guide the community once we open things up to the general public. Basically, things look really good (and exciting) from where I’m standing.

On a personal note, it’s also been rewarding for me to watch the “recent changes” page on the wiki and see people I’ve interacted with over email start to edit articles on the wiki. Citizens, if you haven’t already, check out http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges - it’s not only neat to watch but it also gives some good starting points for collaboration with other people working on the wiki. And hopefully over the weekend we can get completely caught up with the flood of applications (we’re very close)… I do apologize to those applicants we haven’t contacted yet. It’ll happen very soon, for sure.

In the longer term, one Personnel issue that I think the Citizendium project and community will need to address is how much of a factor work experience should be in qualifying to be an editor. It’s obviously important since there’s a lot of expertise outside of academia, and a tendency to draw editors only from academia will produce an unbalanced encyclopedia– but how should work experience be balanced against academic experience? A Ph.D is just a proxy for expertise, but it’s probably a pretty good one. What types of work experience might be equivalently good proxies for expertise? What are the experiential, private sector equivalents to academic publications and original research? I certainly don’t have any answers (I suspect Larry is at least two steps ahead of me here, as he often is), but I’ll sign off with a few observations on expertise that won’t be news to anyone involved in this project yet might bear repeating.

The first is that expertise is not uniformly distributed between fields. In some areas, the vast majority of people who know anything about the subject seem to be in or closely tied to academia. In other areas, cutting-edge expertise seems to be more concentrated in industry or business.

The second is that work experiences in industry, business, and professional areas often lead to different kinds of expertise than does research in academia.

And, to wax philosophical, I think the issue of identifying experts outside of academia is a challenging problem with many edge cases, but clearly isn’t a fundamentally hard problem of the type that doesn’t have a real answer: as a professor of mine used to say, “The existence of dawn and dusk does not preclude the existence of day and night.”

So asks Danielle Sacks. She thinks that the advent of the Citizendium says something interesting about open source generally:

This of course raises the central debate of the entire open-source movement: does the revival of the expert mean we’re already over the whole utopian idea of a democratic, user-generated world? Have we realized that it just doesn’t work?

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Danielle takes hold of the less-hip horn of a false dilemma that a lot of OSS advocates have purveying: either you’re a top-down elitist who rejects the benefits of open source and open content, or you’re a bottom-up amateurist who embraces the free stuff movement. Right now I seem to be a voice in the wilderness, advocating that experts and the general public can come together on roughly equal terms, as part of a bottom-up collaboration, with experts making final decisions as necessary, and the work of everyone being released under a free license. In fact, there’s no reason we can’t view open source itself as involving experts, in a way; it’s just that experts outside of the field of software development need to learn from the “bazaar” model of production.

I’ve posted two essays to citizendium.org that help explain the thinking behind and plans for the Citizendium.

Why Make Room for Experts in Web 2.0? (text of keynote at SDForum from last October 24) You can watch a video of the Q&A.

There’s a bit of conventional wisdom about Web 2.0 that is wrong. According to this conventional wisdom, Web 2.0 involves bringing the power of publishing to the masses. It’s all about harnessing the “wisdom of crowds” and not the wisdom of experts. So, a project that gives experts a special role couldn’t be a Web 2.0 project–even if the expert’s role were part of an online, open, dynamic, collaborative community.

This conventional wisdom is wrong. Experts can have a special and positive role in Web 2.0 projects, or so I’ll argue. As we’ll see, it’s quite understandable why so many people dislike the idea of special experts in open, online collaboration. But, as it turns out, there is no good reason that Web 2.0 projects cannot make room for experts.

So this talk will be argumentative. I’m a philosopher, so it’s probably going to sound a little like a philosophy paper. Sorry about that. Anyway, I’ll begin with an explanation of what Web 2.0 is, as I understand it, and I’ll explain what makes it work. Then I’ll elaborate my claim that experts can and should be given special roles in Web 2.0 projects. Then I’ll spend a lot of time replying to objections.

The Role of Content Brokers in the Era of Free Content (articulates the Citizendium Foundation’s concept for funding free content)

So here’s the proposal: the public presents an offer for a specific sum to go to someone who will write authoritatively on such-and-such a subject; the broker selects the content creator, who creates the content; and then the broker releases the content to the public, free for all (under, for example, a Creative Commons license). The buyers are still the general public, but are expanded to include groups of people, clubs, schools, universities, organizations, governments, and other entities that pay for the work on behalf of the general public. The sellers are still communicators and artists. The brokers can still include editors, designers, and other publishing industry professionals.

This is the concept referred to mysteriously in the FAQ as a “funding model (we think it is exciting and innovative) that will be revealed in good time.”