On the road again. This time I am going to a birthday party: we celebrate the twentieth birthday of the World Wide Web. The date: Monday, November 14th. The location: Rome, Hadrian’s Temple. The guest of honor: sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s proud father, who will deliver the keynote speech. Much more modestly, I too will hold a short talk about Wikicrazia, i.e. collaborative, Internet-mediated governance.
In the foreground, the party; in the background, difficult times for Italy. But they only make the celebration more necessary: nobody dare take it from us! As Saint Augustine wrote sixteen centuries ago, we are the agents of the times: if we don’t like them, we can always invent new times, or at least try to. A growing number of Italian citizens, connected by the web, is doing just that. I am trying to do my bit, too: Wikitalia – we will talk about it on Monday – is exactly that, Italy’s birthday present to the Web, and the Web’s to Italy.
(The video above was not made for the occasion: it is rather an attempt to explain to some interested non-Italians what I want to do with my life. But I find it fits the occasion well.)
I am working on the construction of a new online community, that will be called Edgeryders. This is still a relatively new activity, that deploys a knowledge not entirely coded down yet. There is no instruction manual that, when adhered to, guarantees good results: some things work but not every time, others work more or less every time but we don’t know why.
It is not the first time I do this, and I am discovering that, even in such a wonderfully complex and unpredictable field, one can learn from experience. A lot. Some Edgeryders stuff we imported from the Kublai experience, like logo crowdsourcing and recruiting staff from the fledgling community. Other design decisions are inspired from projects of people I admire, projects like Evoke or CriticalCity Upload; and many are inspired by mistakes, both my own and other people’s.
It is a strange experience, both exhalting and humiliating. You are the crowdsorcerer, the expert, the person that can evoke order and meaning from the Great Net’s social magma. You try: you say your incantations, wave your magic wand and… something happens. Or not. Sometimes everything works just fine, and it’s hard to resist the temptation of claiming credit for it; other times everything you do backfires or fizzles out, and you can’t figure out what you are doing wrong to save your life. Maybe there is no mistake – and no credit to claim when things go well. Social dynamics is not deterministic, and even our best efforts can not guarantee good results in every case.
As far as I can see, the skill I am trying to develop – let’s call it crowdsorcery – requires:
thinking in probability (with high variance) rather than deterministically. An effective action is not the one that is sure to recruit ten good-level contributors, but the one that reaches out to one thousand random strangers. Nine hundred will ignore you, ninety will contribute really lame stuff, nine will give you good-level contibutions and one will have a stroke of genius that will turn the project on its head and influence the remaining ninety-nine (the nine hundred are probably a lost cause in every scenario). The trick is that no one, not even him- or herself, knows in advance who that random genius is: you just need to move in that general direction, and hope he or she will find you.
monitoring and reacting rather than planning and controlling (adaptive stance). It is cheaper and more effective: if a community displays a natural tropism, it makes more sense to encourage it and trying to figure out how to use it for your purposes than trying to fight it. In the online world, monitoring is practically free (even “deep monitoring” à la Dragon Trainer), so don’t be stingy with web analytics.
build a redundant theoretical arsenal instead of going pragmatic (“I do this because it works”). Theory asks interesting questions, and I find that trying to read your own work in the light of theory helps crowdsorcerers and -sorceresses to build themselves better tools and encourages their awareness of what they do. I am thinking a lot along a complexity science approach and using a little run-of-the-mill network math. For now.
These general principles translate into design choices. I have decided to devote a series of posts to the choices my team and I are making in the building of Edgeryders. You can find them here (for now, only the first one is online). If you find errors or have suggestions, we are listening.
Many people wrote me to congratulate for a high profile article on Repubblica (three full pages on one of the main national daily newspapers) on the topic of open government (called “Wikicrazia”, after my book, in the title)and of the interest it is attracting in the national debate. The article itself contributed to such interest: a very strong endorsement induced new curiosity in people previously unaware or uninterested, and prompted some who were already intrigued to take action.
I think the open gov movement, though still a niche one, is going to be irresistible in the long run. Why? Because the work can be divided in packets so small, and the tools are so cheap, that even a single person committing a little time can make a small, but noticeable difference, here and now, without having to wait for systemic reform or cultural change. But I also think that much credit for the present wave of interest should go to Riccardo Luna, former editor in chief of Wired Italy and author of the article in question. Riccardo is not only a good journalist and an excellent communicator; he has become an activist and an organizer of this movement. We talked a lot to each other in these latest few months, and I have seen his enthusiasm grow and become vision. He has an inclusive style, always taking care to give credit where credit is due and to avoid overpersonalization, has won him a lot of sympathy and credibility.
If I am allowed to offer advice – not so much to Riccardo, as to all of us – I think it is important to try to keep the focus on mass collaboration based on self-selection, avoiding to personalize the issue and resisting the temptation to make good, effective contributors to this movement into gurus. It would be misleading. With each project I start, I know that the most valuable collaborator is a person I don’t know yet. It for him or her that I design: so that they can find their way to the project that needs exactly his or her skills, and can be engaged in a useful, respectful and fun way.
Gurus, on the other hand, are just about the last thing we need.