Mitch Kapor gave an impassioned talk at OSBC West on the future of collaboration and the emerging 'knowledge commons,' using Wikipedia as a model. The themes in this keynote resonated strongly with my Omidyar Network-related values, so it was thought-provoking for me on multiple levels:
It's true that anyone can edit any article at any time on Wikipedia. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network has made a charitable contribution to Wikipedia.) This inclusive system is exactly what attracted Kapor, but it's still a novel concept in a mainstream that still believes that someone needs to be in charge.
Kapor was deeply impressed that Wikipedia works as an all-volunteer organization, from the authors to the sysadmins. One anecdote he relayed was that at any one time, there are 100 qualified people around the Wikipedia servers. With this many people, there is always enough coverage; no one is ever "in charge" and relying upon a formal schedule. Volunteers develop and preserve not just system content, but also system integrity.
Another controversial point that Kapor raised: without experts, how can we trust information? Are we wired to only believe information conveyed by experts? (Given the power of urban legend, I think not.) Wikipedia appears to prove the opposite; by opening authorship up to anyone, there is room for perpetual improvement. In a provocative experiment, experts were asked to review same-subject articles from both Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The experts rated the articles comparably. Interestingly, the day after the report was published, the Wikipedia articles were much better (folks went into correct the errors), while the Britannica articles were exactly the same. There was no way to correct Britannica errors in real time, and error correction could only be done by Britannica's paid staff.
New ground is happening in community at Wikipedia. As Kapor states, Wikipedia is not an ant hill where everyone does their own thing; the resource is not emerging from chaos. Wikipedia is a community where individuals support each other. The shared vision of a free encyclopedia - of all the world's knowledge, for all the world's people, in all the world's languages - ties the community together.
Jimmy Wales, one of the Wikipedia founders, originally devised a publishing schedule for multiple layers with peer review and the like. As Kapor tells it, this didn't work. Wales then sent out an email saying that if folks want to volunteer information instead, then they could. From here, Wikipedia became a work of 'peer production.' The knowledge commons evolved from an abstract vision, becoming a world in which people can all do things, and see how their individual activity relates to the larger whole.
Who are the Wikipedians, anyway? Kapor went to a face-to-face gathering last year for the first time. People came from all walks of life, and the community that gathered was different from the world of open source. Here, everyone can contribute, and it doesn't take any specialized expertise. This community also shares its values openly. Many aspects of the community hinge on these values:
#1: Be nice. Kapor sees that this really matters in the Wikipedia community, and people are rewarded accordingly. People expect the best of each other, rather than the worst. "Treat people like they are people, rather than objects to be moved around."
#2: NPOV / Neutral Point of View. Come up with facts that everyone can agree upon This is meant to discourage editorializing, or slanting articles by subjective experience. Be anti-spin, which is tough in today's world. But since there isn't always a neutral point of view to be found...how can you adhere to the value? If the goal is to accurately capture the knowledge of the world, do you not have an obligation to bring more people into the Wikiepdia community to write about areas that haven't been covered? If there's nothing on Africa, must you go out and fund Africans?
#3: Don't criticize, improve. If you don't like something, fix it. If you don't know how to fix it, comment on the talk page so that others can. And if there's a dispute, go to dispute resolution. Kapor has spent endless hours looking at the transcripts. Imagine If everything that happened in our own government was transparent and open, and you could see everything that transpired, every lobbyist's move, every vote, every work of authorship. (At this point, I was sure that Kapor was a card-carrying member of the omidyar.net community!)
Now what? Kapor doesn't think that most of Silicon Valley gets it - not the VCs, and not the entrepreneurs. Wikipedians are largely not technologists. There's an enormous amount of hard-to-get knowledge in the Wikipedia, yet there's no machine-accessible way to query the information, even though that would be highly valuable.
What are the business opportunities? Wikipedia has a way of compiling information on a subject that's unique. If you were to ever run AdWords on Wikipedia, it would be gargantuanly profitable. It makes sense to adopt the model, as Socialtext has. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is an investor in Socialtext.)
One of Kapor's observations really got me thinking: Indicating individual preferences (a la Digg) is not people working together; matching people based on algorithms is not collaboration. (It's important to hear the voice of the community in this way, but it's not collaboration.) In Wikipedia, lots of people work on a single thing in order to create the best, most fair description. Kapor believes that this provides more value than collaborative filtering does. People working together implies a deeper call on individual resources.
Wikipedia takes community to higher, more widespread level. Kaport believes that the community should own the underlying resource, the knowledge base that is created from the community's effort. Commercializing is OK, but the content should be owned by and available to the 'commons.' That's the trick in preserving and sustaining community.
As Kapor remarked, "There is no formula for making money." But if there's something that harnesses the efforts of the community while genuinely empowering the community, then profits make sense. Businesses here (ad-sellers or otherwise) will have to be more responsible to their commuity than most businesses are, and that will be a good thing.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys osbc community mitch kapor wikipedia omidyar network open source technology
