The 'wisdom of crowds' loses steam
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. That popular aphorism never seemed truer than today when reading The Wall Street Journal's analysis of Wikipedia's declining volunteer base. Despite countless articles extolling the virtues and seeming omnipotence of "community" over the past several years, the technology industry seems to be settling back into old habits:
Command and control.
It's not that the "wisdom of crowds" idea hasn't influenced the way technology is developed, or how news and information are gathered and distributed. It has.
It's just that the promised sea change has proved to be far less disruptive than we expected.
Take Wikipedia. As the Journal calls out, volunteerism has declined as the ease of contribution has waned. The easy topics are taken. Rules for upping the quality have proliferated. Wikipedia is becoming...corporate.
Nick Carr has been pointing this out for years, but it's only now becoming self-evident. Wikipedia has grown up and, in so doing, is looking more and more like the encyclopedic world it sought to displace.
Nor is it alone. Open-source business models increasingly look like proprietary software models, as the Software Freedom Law Center's Bradley Kuhn suggests.
Even uber successful open-source communities like Joomla have discovered that reliance on volunteers falls short of what a few good paid developers can do.
That's a positive discovery by Joomla. A more worrisome discovery is that Mozilla remains far too dependent on Google to fund development of Firefox. Mozilla has lots of community, right? Yes. As Mozilla CEO John Lilly has said, 40 percent of Firefox's code comes from developers not employed by the foundation.
But that still leaves 60 percent, and virtually all of the core development work, that relies on "company," not "community," which is how much of the world's best open-source software is developed: funded by IBM and other "community" members.
For those who think "community" is a euphemism for "everyone else doing my work for me," think again. It just doesn't work that way.
Of course, companies can go to the opposite extreme, too. Apple, for one, gets beat up for a heavy-handed approach to its App Store approval process. Apple, in other words, doesn't seem to care one iota what "the community" thinks.
But then, this is the same App Store with more than 100,000 applications and 2 billion downloads to date. No wonder Apple isn't apologizing: it's clearly benefiting most people most of the time, or the application developers would take their complaints to a different platform.
But they haven't, and this calls out the problem with deifying "community." It's accepted wisdom that one shouldn't "anger the community," as if it's some unknown god that demands the occasional virgin to be thrown into the volcano. But the truth is, "community" is not really much different from the "customers" and "partners" the industry has sought to satisfy for decades.
So, yes, by all means seek to work with your community of users and partners, but don't expect "the community" to do your work for you. Guess what? "The community" already has a day job, and can't afford to work full-time for you unless you pay it.
All of which leaves us largely where we started. The most successful software companies don't rely on some vague "community" to build their products. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google (Android, anyone?), and even, increasingly, Red Hat (JBoss, KVM, etc.) build great software based on their own, internal plans and expertise and "the community" buys it (or resells/embeds/etc. it).
The big shift, however, has been in the transparency of the feedback loop, which has been a welcome change in the industry. So, to the extent that "community" simply implies a more open way of developing and distributing software, then, yes, it has been significant.
But it hasn't changed the world. It has only changed the way the dominant technology companies...dominate.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is chief operating officer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Prior to Canonical, Matt was general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, an open-source applications company. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
stupid is what stupid does. and then idiocracy is proven to be a freaking documentary.:)
enjoy the bread lines.
I don't think anyone is pretending that open source (or wisdom of crowds, wiki, or any other names) was going to *replace* the traditional closed source approach. But it's a powerful force that no smart company should ignore.
And smart companies like Apple, Google, IBM have not ignored open source, but actively embraced it. But note that they only open source parts of their projects where it makes sense. They are smart enough to not assume open source is the solution to all things, nor do they think that open source should totally ignored.
The author seems to think that since open source didn't take over the world, it's a failure. I have to disagree.
congratulations matt, you beat the internet!
Hopefully Wikipedia and Firefox won't go into decline as well - but when the shine of newness and usefulness wears off, and a set group of people occupy the top levels, leaving everyone behind, then the new people go off to set up a new community of their own, and the decline cycle begins again.
Hopefully Wikipedia and Firefox won't go into decline as well - but when the shine of newness and usefulness wears off, and a set group of people occupy the top levels, leaving everyone behind, then the new people go off to set up a new community of their own, and the decline cycle begins again.
Apple is an excellent example. They are constantly listening to the community, they just are not ultimately driven by it. Other companies often either fake listening or don't have their own self-identity so they just put their finger into the wind and depend too much on what the community is saying, wise or not.
Doesn't work that way.
Sometimes, the "community" can pull together and get good things done (Wikipedia's founding days, SCO being beaten to a pulp, etc), and sometimes, the "community" doesn't really give a damn - it wanders off, gets distracted, etc.
There are FOSS projects that have chugged along steadily for years on end with no shortage of help. There are others that generate a lot of initial buzz, but end up driving everyone off. Same with any other enterprise, really.
Matt, things may be a little different in this case than what your statement is telling. Do you really think a project with a community as huge as Joomla!'s doesn't have a whole pile of people ready to put in lot's of free time and effort at any given moment? Think about it.
Matt - did you read the last paragraph of OSM's announcement where they said they are excited about community engagement? Something doesn't fit, does it?
It is very disappointing to read this when some of us have been trying for some time, now, to get the project to acknowledge a problem with community engagement. It's unfortunate OSM isn't more open and transparent and that they don't engage the community in these decisions. I fear continued use of that type of decision-making only exasperates an already concerning problem.
You need to remember, Joomla! is 100% community based. This isn't a corporation or someone's personal investment. Joomla! was built by thousands of us.
Among the limitations of 100% volunteer development is that it is hard to get those big blocks in sustainable ways, not just over a few months (we have lots of volunteers who will dive into a specific project that interests them for a month or two and do fantastic work) but over what is now 4 years and we hope will be many more years in the future.
Second, the more volunteers you have, the more time you need to spend coordinating and responding to their contributions. That is simply not the same fun as wriitng the code you are interested in or of the same personal value as write the improvements that help solve an issue you have.
One of our struggles has always been how to manage patches and code questions from volunteers. Now we have our most knowledgeable people doing that not just when they have some time and not at the expense of their businesses or of their personal lives. So in the end, I think we all think that one measure of success for this experiment will be sustained and then growing contributions from other people, especially people with the skill levels to make deep contributions to the Joomla! core.
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated ." - M. Twain
Enterprise collective intelligence, prediction markets, collaborative forecasting, etc. are booming. See:
http://www.pmcluster.com/
There are new suppliers, services and above all geometric enterprise adoption.
Remember, communities, corporations and WoC are complex network markets. They are simple not simplistic.
Cheers,
-j
http://www.networksingularity.com/
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated ." - M. Twain
Enterprise collective intelligence, prediction markets, collaborative forecasting, etc. are booming. See:
http://www.pmcluster.com/
There are new suppliers, services and above all geometric enterprise adoption.
Remember, communities, corporations and WoC are complex network markets. They are simple not simplistic.
Cheers,
-j
http://www.networksingularity.com/
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated ." - M. Twain
Enterprise collective intelligence, prediction markets, collaborative forecasting, etc. are booming. See:
http://www.pmcluster.com/
There are new suppliers, services and above all geometric enterprise adoption.
Remember, communities, corporations and WoC are complex network markets. They are simple not simplistic.
Cheers,
-j
http://www.networksingularity.com/
But as the technologies evolve, we could see disruptions again. It will likely be a cycle. But organizing and process are what we do. Instead, we should look a little to the future.
The time the volunteer community is most important and beneficial is during the founding and initial ramp-up of the organization - it's FORMATIVE time. Whether it be to start a software organization, raise funds for a cause, build a community playground or save people from natural disaster, volunteers play a critically important role in societies around the world.
But to diminish their importance or think the effort less meaningful because paid staff are taking over once-volunteer-driven efforts? Now that's UNWISE.
Once any volunteer organization reaches altitude, it's normal, and it's WISE to turn to a corporate model to sustain the organization or help it grow. It's up to that group's leadership to decide when to relinquish the reins, of course, but we can't go on, thinking it's somehow WISE to continue bleeding volunteers dry because the movement would be somehow blighted. That's bunk.
It is UNWISE to preclude the Business Community as part of the effort, whether that's in the formation- or the production-end. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it does not. It depends on the circumstances. Take for instance:
Volunteers don't run the military in the U.S. today, paid personnel lead the rank and file; but we sure tip our hats to the all-volunteer militia who fought under George Washington in the 1700's to give our Founding Fathers the power to start a new country.
Volunteers don't run most food banks or homeless shelters today, paid staff does a lion's share; but we sure appreciate those who recognized the need over the years and got them started on a volunteer basis in our local communities.
Volunteers don't operate most colleges and universities today, paid staff handles the day-to-day; but most were launched by a small group of volunteers who had the wisdom and stamina to ramp one up in their part of the world.
Volunteers don't handle the engineering, construction or insurance pay-outs near our rivers and waterways, but they sure as hell come through when back-breaking sandbagging is needed to save lives and property.
Volunteers come together to start things up at a time they're needed. Over time, the maintenance, repair, operation and in some case leadership are more times than not, relinquished to paid personnel.
Of course, strong leadership in the organizations is crucial to dictate the when, where and how this transition might take place. It is strong leadership that is in short supply - but that's a whole other subject.
Bottom line is, bringing in hired hands doesn't take away one iota of import or impact from the original all-volunteer community effort. It doesn't diminish the profound impact that effort had on society either (and Wikipedia has most certainly had a major impact on society!).
It is a natural, normal and welcome part of the organization's cycle to hand off some or all of the power to the "business community" once the initial ramp-up is over.
Volunteers start things. Paid staff carries it forward.
So, the 'Wisdom of Crowds' hasn't lost steam at all. It's just entered a new phase.
- by cube3 November 25, 2009 1:50 PM PST
- what happened to the blocked comments without signing over my ID and add info from other 3rd party paid partners?
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(25 Comments)was it deemed unwise?:)