Fri 5 May 2006
Ben Hill, my co-conspirator for Mycroft, our distributed collaboration project, appears as one of two guests on this week’s edition of Jon Udell’s weekly podcast over at InfoWorld. The other guest is Nathan McFarland of castingwords.com. CastingWords is a podcast transcription service that uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as the outsource labor provider.
Jon wanted to to talk about the possibilities of ‘harnessing collective intelligence,’ (a la Tim O’Reilly) a phrase I really like. Collective intelligence is really built when people can collaborate and contribute in the course of their daily activities. When you make a dedicated activity out of it, you begin to move towards the individual side of the individual/collective continuum. We built Mycroft with this in mind, and it was the main reason we chose to focus in on tasks that take only a few seconds - tasks you can do without ever leaving whatever page hosts the Mycroft module. I think enabling these casual, fun interactions will be the key to sustaining a high participation rate over time.
May 5th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
What do you think is the difference between collective intelligence and collective knowledge and which is Mycroft trying to build?
May 5th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
That’s a good question. The distinction is certainly fuzzy. But though I cringe at the whole ‘Data, Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom’ scale, I think it’s helpful in this situation. As you go up the scale, not only does the commodity become more synthetic and rarified, but it also gets more active. Data is a thing in the world, lifeless, a 1 or a 0. Wisdom is a unique human ability - the kind of thing that is drawn from experience and learning. It’s a moving target. Somewhere in between, but more towards the active, uniquely-human end of the spectrum, is intelligence, and that’s where Mycroft lives.
Cutting out most of those words: Knowledge is a product, while intelligence is a process (and a product). Mycroft is a living, changing community of contributors, and so it fits with intelligence for me.
May 7th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Hey, no link to the podcast itself?
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/05/05.html#a1443
May 7th, 2006 at 9:19 am
You know, I guess I’m just ignorant about the etiquette on that stuff. Like when I blogged about Yochai Benkler’s talk, I didn’t hotlink your mp3 of it because I thought it would be rude - and because your post has some commentary on it. Same thing here. Maybe that’s silly…