DCMOC

Rollin’ with the top down

February 14, 2008 | Filed under: General

I read a great piece the other day by Kevin Kelly at “The Technium.”  Read it here:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/02/the_bottom_is_n.php

Kelly’s one of the originators of Wired magazine, and he’s written a lot about the hive mind, the wisdom of crowds, the whole idea that one route to excellence is to empower the people and to watch what emerges.  But in this post he counters that sort of “bottom up” model with a case for the value of expert control from the top.  He talks about the value of editors, of a centralized controller of the hive. Here’s an excerpt from the posting: 

“In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
…ad infinitum. 

The exhilarating frontier today is the myriad ways in which we can mix out-of-control creation with various levels of top-down control.”

I think Kelly’s dead-on here: we must empower the hive and be eager to publicize what it produces, while at the same time we need to determine how to apply (and how much to apply) people, processes, and technologies to showcase the excellent and limit the dreck.  Figuring out how to do that is one of our challenges here at Capella, in NextGen, and specifically in CM&OC.

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