[WikiEN-l] FT and the Wikipedia strat

[michael west]

this is a cut and paste from the London Financial Times on Thursday Morning:
Either buy the newspaper or work in a company that does :-(

Looking to Wikipedia for answers

By Thomas Malone

Published: November 5 2008 14:43 | Last updated: November 6 2008 20:09

To understand how large-scale work was organised during the past 100 years,
the best models were traditional hierarchical organisations such as General
Motors, IBM, and Wal-Mart.

But to understand how large-scale work will be organised in the future, we
need to look at newer examples such as Wikipedia, eBay, and Google.

[image: Prof. Thomas W. Malone]

In Wikipedia, for instance, thousands of people from across the globe have
collectively created a large and surprisingly high-quality intellectual
product – the world's largest encyclopaedia – and have done so with almost
no centralised control. Anyone who wants to can change almost anything, and
decisions about what changes are kept are made by a loose consensus of those
who care.

Wikipedia is a remarkable organisational invention that illustrates how new
forms of communication, such as the internet, are making it possible to
organise work in new and innovative ways.

Of course, new ways of organising work are not desirable everywhere. In many
cases, traditional hierarchies are still needed to capture economies of
scale or to control risks. But in an increasing number of cases, we can have
the economic benefits of large organisations without giving up the human
benefits of small ones – freedom, flexibility, motivation and creativity.

Escape the net - use your
feet<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e1de7344-aa80-11dd-897c-000077b07658.html>

New forms of wireless and desk-less working sound great but isn't it just
easier to deal productively with someone when they sit next to you, says
Stefan Stern

These human benefits can provide decisive competitive advantages in
knowledge-based and innovation-driven work. During the coming decades, we
can expect to see such ideas in operation in more and more parts of the
economy.

These new practices have various names: radical decentralisation,
crowd-sourcing, peer production, and wikinomics. But the phrase I find most
useful is "collective intelligence".

In our work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for
Collective Intelligence, this phrase has inspired us to ask the provocative
question:

"*How can people and computers be connected so that – collectively – they
act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done
before?*"

What if we could have any number of people and computers connected to, for
instance, care for patients in a hospital? Or design cars. Or sell retail
products.

We might that find the best way to do a task that today is done by five
full-time people would be to use one part-time employee and a host of
freelance contractors each working for a few minutes a day.

One important type of collective intelligence is "crowd intelligence", where
anyone who wants to can contribute.

Sometimes, as in the case of Wikipedia or video sharing website YouTube,
people contribute their work for free because they get other benefits such
as enjoyment, recognition, or opportunities to socialise with others. In
other cases, such as online retailer eBay, people get paid to do so.

Anyone can become an eBay seller and most of the key decisions about product
mix, pricing, and advertising are made not by managers at eBay, but by the
collective intelligence of the eBay sellers themselves.

A few years ago, eBay managers were surprised to find members successfully
selling automobiles on the site, so they added additional support for this
product line.

Sometimes, crowd intelligence can even operate inside the boundaries of a
single company. Google, Microsoft, and Best Buy have all used internal
"prediction markets" to tap the collective intelligence of people throughout
their organisations. In these prediction markets, people buy and sell
"shares" of predictions about future events such as revenue levels. If their
predictions are correct, they are rewarded (either with real money or with
points).

Microsoft has used prediction markets to estimate completion dates for
internal products. When it launched one of the first of these markets, the
share price for a product scheduled to be finished three months later
declined within minutes to a price indicating only a 1.2 per cent
probability it would be completed on time. The managers in charge of the
project had thought it was on schedule, but when they saw these results they
investigated further and found problems. The product was eventually released
three months late.

Here was a case where knowledge about the project's problems was available
inside an organisation but it took a prediction market to bring it to the
attention of people who could do something about it.

Another important type of collective intelligence is "cyber-human
intelligence", where computers do not just connect people to each other,
they provide their own "intelligence" as well.

Google harvests the intelligence of millions of people who create web pages
and link them to each other, but its sophisticated algorithms also rank the
pages based on how many links exist to a given page.

Electronically connected forms of crowd intelligence and large-scale forms
of cyber-human intelligence have never before existed. Yet these examples
are just the beginning, and it is very likely that innovative organisations
will discover more ways to radically change existing industries or create
new ones.

These changes will not happen overnight, but the rate of change is
accelerating and business people a hundred years from now may find the
pervasive corporate hierarchies of today as quaint as we find the feudal
farming system of an earlier era.

*Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the
MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center
for Collective Intelligence*

Copyright <http://www.ft.com/servicestools/help/copyright> The Financial
Times Limited 2008