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October 21, 2005
Yochai Benkler of Yale on Open Source Collaboration
On the POPTech stage is Yochai Benkler of Yale talking about knowledge and the collaborative effort of groups, and that through a participatory process, creates an end result that can be the equivalent of a full-time PhD.
What this brings to mind for me if the book, "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki." (a book given to me by my 7th/8th Grade students who I recently trained in the "difficult conversations" of peer mediation).
I can see this model in a self-organizing system of open source computing, where the collective meta-mind sets its own tone and pace of sharing knowledge which results in an application created for the collective good. (Or when a group of people guess the number of beans in a jar, and collectively estimate the number of those beans more accurately than any single person.)
But I wonder about whether that same end result is possible when the "ecosystem" of the distributed knowledge is - forced to produce a product under the constraint of real world deadlines and "baskets" of pre-determined, yet undefined, components of functionality.
What I'm positing is whether an open-source development paradigm is possible when a group of say, customers or marketing folks (the customer's proxy) say "We want this amount of stuff, in this short amount of time."
Clearly, this is a difficult challenge for even a centrally located group of knowledge workers, managed as a single team (often stressed with multiple tasks or multiple projects). It seems like it is incredibly challenging when a time constraint in the form of a deadline, and a demand for a certain amount of capability - simultaneously exist from a specific customer, or a proxy for that customer.
But then again, I could be wrong... I would hope to see real-life examples someday.
Posted by Mike at October 21, 2005 5:46 PM
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