CollaborativEye

There is so much hype about Web 2.0, social media, and collective intelligence that it is really refreshing to read a critical, contrarian perspective, even if you don't happen to agree with it.  Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur is one such perspective.  Keen doesn't pull any punches:

"How today's Internet is killing our culture" (the book's sub-title)

"...the blind leading the blind" (describing Wikipedia)

"...creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity" (output of Web 2.0)

"One chilling reality in this brave new digital epoch is the blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth."

"Ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule" (definition of Web 2.0) 

Keen makes a couple of good points, but in the end goes astray badly. He raises the issue of expertise and experience being overwhelmed by "amateurs". He cites the case of Wikipedia, for example, where a PhD in astronomy can get edited out by a backyard stargazer.  What do you base your trust of information on? On credentials or authority? On majority vote? On popularity of an opinion? On how many clicks somebody gets? This actually touches on philosophical issues, as witnessed by Keen's fear about the "disappearance of truth". Keen is admittedly a modernist as opposed to a post-modernist. Therefore, he places a lot of trust in authority, and "objective truth". He feels that the Web 2.0 culture is creating nothing but a post-modern collection of opinions instead of truth.  Without going into a full discourse on modernism versus postmodermism (and how to avoid the excesses of both viewpoints), let me instead point out Keen's glaring, and deadly mistake: He makes much of experts such as journalists who in his opinion provide objective, truthful reporting. Come on!!!  An article written in the New York Times is just as biased as a blog entry -- what is important is to have discipline to discern these biases (of course recognizing that we have our own biases affecting our ability to identify biases :-) , and transparency on the part of the source to  "bare their biases".  Holding on to a delusion that experts are unbiased and therefore the only ones capable of discovering or expounding on truth, is simply inexcusable.

This does raise the issue of transparency in the Web 2.0 world, however. Keen gives examples of disingenuous blogging and advertising masquerading as "content." This is a very real issue that must be addressed. Of course Keen isn't alone in his views. Jaron Lanier has written a very interesting essay called Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. I think Lanier has a much more balanced perspective than Keen. Here is a stellar quote from Lanier's essay:

"In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion."

What is needed in the Web 2.0 world are trusted mechanisms to connect content to sources (persons) and their "credentials", giving content consumers the information they need to determine how much credibility to give the source and the content. EBAY is attempting this in a restricted sense with the tracking of reputation of buyers and sellers; Technorati with their concept of "Authority" for blogs.  Fortunately, transparency is not typically an issue for Web 2.0 within the enterprise because content contributors are known, along with their credentials, achievements, and organizational authority. Imagine this extended to all content on the web! Keen points to Citizendium as an example of a hybrid Web 2.0 project that attempts to combine the best of Wikipedia with "gentle expert oversight" and a focus on "credibility and quality, not just quantity". I hope we see more of this type of offering.

Perhaps Keen's most salient point is hidden in his moaning about how newspaper and music companies are losing revenues. I don't care about dinosaur business institutions losing money -- shame on them for not adapting to a new world. What concerns me is the potential loss of incentive for experts and artists to develop their knowledge and/or skills. We certainly DON'T want a world where nobody excels in knowledge or talent. Our world would suffer in this case. I believe that business models must be developed to reward true experts and artists who produce superior content (could be an article, a piece of music, a blog posting).  This doesn't mean there is no room for offerings from novices, dilettantes, or even morons.  The market will need to assign value to content based on the source, as well as "2.0 credentials" such as popularity, link frequency, and the like.

So rather than just trash Web 2.0,  let's put our collective intelligence into figuring out sustainable Web 2.0 business models where market forces are allowed to produce rational determinations of value and content is differentiated and rewarded appropriately.

I spent about an hour at last week's Open Source conference here in Portland with Rod Beckstrom, co-author of The Starfish and the Spider. I won't give a book review here (see the Amazon.com link for some excellent user book reviews), but will focus on a few observations. In a nutshell, the starfish is a biological example of a completely decentralized organism -- cut it in half and you'll eventually get two starfish because it has no central nervous system. On the other hand, the spider, although it may look superficially like a starfish, is extremely centralized -- cut off its head and it is dead! The book gives several examples of decentralized organizations which exhibit resilience similar to that of the starfish: the Apache Nation, Alcoholics Anonymous, and even al Qaeda. There are many reasons why such organizations prevail and thrive while their centralized counterparts fail. I'll focus on two: circles, and ideology:

1) circles: these are independent, autonomous units that form without hierarchy or structure. Self-enforcement of norms, rather than top-down enforcement of rules, lends power and resilience to these units. Decentralized organizations are difficult to combat because of the existence of many circles - you can squash a circle, but in all likelihood one or two will pop up to replace it. Web 2.0 technologies make the formation and maintenance of many "virtual" circles feasible, transcending spatial boundaries. Collaboration is essential between members of a circle because there is little to no hierarchy and certainly no centralized communication channels.

2) ideology: decentralized organizations need a compelling ideology as "glue". Often, such ideologies provide a more powerful and effective bonding mechanism than what is found in many centralized organizations, which normally have stakeholder monetary value at the top of organizational values. This is in line with studies on employee motivation which find that monetary rewards are seldom the most important factors for employee satisfaction and retention. Although the book doesn't get into it much, I believe Web 2.0 tools can be instrumental in spreading ideology between members: educating new members, reinforcing it amongst existing members, evolving and maturing it through dialog, debate, shared stories, and capturing it for posterity sake.

The book makes several statements to the effect that decentralized organizations (or decentralized industries) do not make much money. I want to fight this statement, but have to concede that if you look at most examples, it is true. But is it necessarily true? For example, al Qaeda does not make money, but it certainly is an organization that raises a lot of money. The fact that the money is raised and spent in a decentralized fashion doesn't change the fact that money is being made. In a different type of example, IBM's involvement in the Open Source community does not generate any direct software revenues for Big Blue, but it estimates a savings of over $1B per year in development costs in addition to sizeable service revenue (Source: Wikinomics). I believe the real innovation that needs to occur is to take the concepts of decentralization as outlined in Beckstrom's book, and develop sustainable businesses that generate value for investors, participants, and all other stakeholders.

Starfish points in this direction with the interesting concept of a hybrid organization: one which combines centralized components with decentralized components. Two types are presented:

1) A centralized organization with a decentralized customer experience (for example, eBay)

2) A centralized organization that decentralizes internal parts of the business (for example, Sun and IBM with Open Source).

So what is new here? Certainly the concepts of empowerment, decentralization, moving decisions "to the edge" have been around for a while. What is new is that "2.0" technologies are now available that can make decentralization feasible on a very large scale (and ironically on a very small scale as well). What else is new is a growing demographic that prefers working in non-hierarchical, decentralized environments (see my post on changing demographics of the Web 2.0 Net Generation).

A new competence that will be required of organizations (and their leaders) in the future is to identify specific elements in a business that need centralization, and which elements need to be cut loose with decentralization. This will certainly involve some risk taking, and the ability to reconfigure business operations and even business models in sometimes radical ways. Beckstrom calls this "finding the sweet spot", and the exciting thing is that it is not really a "spot", but a moving target that changes as industries and customers evolve. Companies which develop a strategic competence in being able to find (and keep tracking) the sweet spot of their businesses will produce market leading profits.