By tomcalloway on

I'd like to recommend the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. It mentions Linux development as an example, but more important, it provides specific criteria that determine whether collective knowledge-building projects like open source software are achieving the best decisions they can, given the collective knowledge of a broad set of people.

I'm reading this for other reasons, but it seems so relevant I thought I would make a post. Here's a nice summary from one of the editorial reviews on Amazon.com:

"If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. 'Wise crowds' need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge."

I would only caution that the book carefully defines these criteria, to show when and how these criteria are met by situations. For instance, not all decentralization automatically leads to wise decisions, although decentralization is necessary for them.

I'd be interested to hear of other sources of open source philosophy. The key contribution of this book is that it points toward a general theory of collective knowledge that is broadly applicable and empirically verified. The addition of empiricism to speculative or principled philosophy about open source seems important.

Now, I'll be quiet and go back to chapter 8 of Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes and finish that book, so I can start to be of real use here in the way I would like to be... ;)

Comments

dado’s picture

dado commented

I saw a reference to this book in Technology Review magazine (MIT's). Sounds like the author is preaching to the choir.

Does the book have any paradigm-shifting million dollar ideas or does it just give a solid justification for Drupalling?

dado
http://schtickdisc.org

tomcalloway’s picture

tomcalloway commented

I think the value is in the criteria it gleans from published research and then translates into readable language and illustrations, so that by applying the criteria, the available knowledge in everyone's brain is used in the most effective way.

See the author's website: www.wisdomofcrowds.com (especially the excerpt and Q&A)

The value to Drupal and any other open source project, is that it provides insights into how to make such projects even better, by taking advantage of what science has to say about decision-making in groups.

I'm still reading the book, so I can't offer a comprehensive summary. It divides problems into three categories: cognition problems, coordination problems, and I forget the other. Each problem requires different uses of "the crowd".

I listed what I think Drupal could benefit from on this other post: http://drupal.org/node/32360#comment-67306

One example is for all users to be able to vote on proposed new features and new code.