Dave Pollard has another one of his classic life-changing blog entries, which is really worth reading and pondering on.

The article starts with an amazing graph analyzing optimal decision-making processes and with a discussion of the Wisdom of Crowds model by James Surowiecky.

I’m only reproducting the conclusion, which differentiates between complicated and complex problems, which are best tackled through 2 different methodologies:

1. Tackling Complicated Problems with the learn-analyze-imagine-assess-decide-on-action process

“Here by contrast is the optimal process, for complicated (not complex) problems:

The executives identify and qualify a crowd of co-workers, customers (including prospective customers) and informed members of the public, and interview them, in interactive sessions witnessed by the organization’s creative people, to augment their (the executives’ and the crowd’s) collective knowledge of the problem, knowledge of solutions that have worked in the past in similar situations, experience solving similar problems, knowledge of people who can help solve the problem, and knowledge of relevant tools, models and methods that can help.

The executives then charge the creative people (who by virtue of their involvement in step 1 now have a deep contextual understanding of the problem and how to approach it) with imagining new solutions that might work to solve the problem, working both individually and as a team. These creative people do not assess or rank these potential solutions — their job is simply to identify alternatives.

The executives then canvass the crowd from step 1, presenting them with the solutions that have worked in past, those which the executives based on their experience think have potential, plus the alternatives that were surfaced in step 2. The crowd makes the final decision.

This learn-analyze-imagine-assess-decide-on-action process involves each group of stakeholders doing what they do best. If there are appropriate incentives for the crowd (and sometimes that’s as simple as recognition and thanks), this process need not be cumbersome, and to some extent it can be automated (members of the ‘crowd’ can to some extent self-qualify by going through an online qualification survey, and step 3 can also be done entirely online). It is course frightening to executives, because it reveals their true, limited value in the decision-making process. In fact just about anyone can perform the three steps above (they are mostly administrative and facilitative), bringing into question the need for highly-paid executives, and a hierarchical decision-making organizational structure, at all. So this approach is clearly more amenable to egalitarian, non-hierarchical organizations. It’s also bad news for the consultants and outside experts — they aren’t needed in the process at all.”

2. Tackling Complex Problems with the learn-explore-imagine-converse-emerge-let-self-decide-on-action process
“The process for such problems must of necessity be emergent, rather than prescriptive as for merely complicated problems. Such problems do not lend themselves to (anywhere near) ‘complete’ knowledge, rigorous analysis, determination of clear causality, or predictability. In fact, such problems don’t have ‘solutions’ per se at all. What can emerge is a collective understanding sufficient to allow all of the participants in the process to contribute knowledgeably, positively and responsibly to addressing the problem in self-organized adaptive ways, individually and collectively, in the context of their own lives and work. This process is essentially the same process that indigenous cultures have used for millennia to address such problems, and the same process used by ‘complex system’ methodologies like Open Space:

The project champions constitute themselves and selected researchers (perhaps including a qualified or self-qualified crowd) to collect, organize and share as much relevant information as possible about the problem/issue.

The project champions then invite anyone with sufficient passion around the issue to commit appropriate time and energy to the project, to study the information collected in step 1 and attend one or more facilitated, self-managed sessions to explore and discuss the problem/issue. Those who accept the invitation become in effect a second self-qualified crowd.

The project champions document the proceedings of these sessions and facilitate the organization of groups to pursue collective actions emerging from them, involving attendees and others as appropriate. But, most importantly, each attendee is charged with the responsibility to pursue individual actions and to individually initiate other collective actions involving non-attendees, that they think make sense in the context of their own life and work as a result of the understanding they have acquired from the sessions.

This learn-explore-imagine-converse-emerge-let-self-decide-on-action process is structurally similar but significantly different in methodology and responsibility than that outlined above for complicated problems. Each process respects the different characteristics of the problem/issue and appreciates the need for a different approach to it.”

The OpenBusiness blog publishes an opinion contrasting the author-pays open access model to the commercial model of scientific publishing.

This immediately provokes the ringing of an alarmbell, as I find the author-pays model, which requires the author him/herself to pay for publication of a scientific article, to have serious problems of equity.

I asked Peter Suber for a commentary and he immediately wrote the following re-assuring words about the open access model of publishing:

“One of my constant harangues is that the term “author pays” is false and misleading. Here’s an excerpt from my Open Access Overview:

A common misunderstanding is that all OA journals use an “author pays” business model. There are two mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront processing fee is an “author pays” model. In fact, fewer than half of today’s OA journals (47%) charge author-side fees. When OA journals do charge fees, the fees are usually paid by author-sponsors (employers or funders) or waived, not paid by authors out of pocket. This misunderstanding is harmful because it makes authors wonder whether they can afford to pay the fees. In fact there are many reasons why OA journals do not exclude the poor.

When OA journals do charge these fees, I call them “author-side” fees rather than “author fees”, since they must be paid by someone on the author’s side of the transaction, like a funder or employer, as opposed to someone at the reader’s side of the transaction, like a library.

But the main points are these: the majority of OA journals don’t charge any author-side fees, and for the minority that do, the fees are usually paid by sponsors or waived. Hence, authors rarely pay out of pocket. Long-term, as OA prevails, we can pay for OA journals with the savings from the cancellation, conversion, or demise of subscription-based (non-OA) journals. Then we can move from today’s situation, in which authors rarely pay out of pocket, to a situation in which they never do.

A related point is that a study last year showed that more non-OA journals than OA journals charge author-side fees. So if there is an effect to exclude the poor, non-OA journals are guilty more often than OA journals. I say more about this in an article in the June 2006 issue of my newsletter.”

I just wanted to share with our readers some of the qualitative changes that are taking place at the P2P Foundation.

First of all, it seems clear that it is evolving from a personal project, to a collective project, from a team of collaborators that can recognize their own ideals and values in the P2P vision. Both the blog and the wiki are now collective projects, carried by different authors.

The second change is that we are moving from the virtual to the ‘physical’. I just returned from the Netherlands, where we are creating a ‘Stichting’, a legal nonprofit face for our work. The seminar tour that we discussed is part of that, of bringing the P2P meme to various physically present audiences.

In this context I’d like to share one of the reports on a lecture in Antwerp, Belgium, which is well-written and gives an idea of the impact that these ideas can have. Read it here at the These Days blog. Thanks to the author Frederic De Vries of Druppels.be.

The seminar tour signifies a third shift as well. After four years of volunteering without income, we have a budding business model, based on sharing what we’ve learned through our research over these last few years. Judging from the success of the seminars, particulary in the Netherlands, audiences are hungry for precisely this type of meaning-making.

Bruno Giussani recently summarized the important ideas of Xavier Comtesse on the Direct Economy.

He writes:
“Could “direct democracy” provide a proper metaphor to describe the current economic transformation? Are we heading towards a “direct economy”? In a system of direct democracy, sovereignty is lodged with the citizens – or at least, with those among them that choose to actively participate in the system. They can not only pick among prepackaged options (vote) or candidates (election) but they also can deeply co-shape the policy process. Switzerland is probably the strongest case: here new laws can be put forth, and even the Constitution modified, by citizens’ initiative. Translate that into business terms and we have a description of a system where consumers have a direct influence on what companies develop and produce for them. The more informed, opinionated and wired (socially connected) they are, the more they are likely to make use of this influence and to try to organize it – exactly as in a direct democracy system. On this premise Xavier Comtesse, who heads the Geneva branch of think-tank Avenir Suisse, is writing a book on the idea of “direct economy”. “We’re exiting an economic system based on the producer’s know-how and heading towards one centered on the customer’s know-how”

In additional commentary on the process of knowledge transfer from firms to customers, he writes:

“in order to interact and participate and co-create, people need to develop or acquire specific know-how. Assembling a bookshelf may require a relatively limited know-how (although for some people it may be overwhelming), but booking a flight ticket online or creating a blog are tasks of a higher complexity, and customizing a laptop is more complex still. Some of this knowledge is purely practical, other is highly conceptual, but in order to benefit from these products or services the customers have to acquire it. How do people acquire this know-how? Mostly by what Xavier calls “transfer”, which can be implicit or explicit. Implicit: “When Dell offers me a way to customize a laptop, they also encourage – or force – me to acquire new knowledge: in a way they operate a transfer of know-how to me”, he writes in the draft of his book. Explicit: online forums and websites, eBay’s University, Swissquote’s ‘trading seminars’, communities or practice, etc. Secondly, Xavier points out that often many of these developments (most notably in the airline business, but also elsewhere) are labeled as “low cost”, but that’s the wrong label, he contends, and the wrong way to look at it: they should be called “high productivity” – because that’s the impact of the active role of the customers: productivity gains. Lower prices in the production process are the result, but the systemic change, he says, is mostly about raising productivity by involving the customers.”

We recently discovered the research of Ken Thompson on Bioteaming, which he defines as:

“Bioteaming is about what we can learn from the teams in nature in our organisational teams. It is about how we can base our teams on natural principles, which have developed and proved themselves useful through millions of years of evolution.

Now some of these ideas have been tried before with some success and some failures. However I believe that now because of the advent of a whole new generation of internet-based communication technologies and tools it is now possible, for the first time, to create the truly successful human bioteams

Bioteaming is not about us all behaving like ants or bees – rather it is about how we incorporate natural principles, based on 10 million years hard won evolutionary experience to make smart human teams much more effective and how we can use technology to help!”

The link above has a detailed explanation of the characteristics of such teams.

Ken’s expertise lies in the principles and practices of Mass Collaboration, as evidenced in the typology below:

“There are three types of internet-based “mass collaborationâ€? which I would characterise as:

1. Give and Take – for example creating shared distributed computing capacity

Example: alllowing Skype to use some spare computing, in exchanging for using the service

2. Needles in Haystacks – connecting to other like-minds through shared interest rather than personal relationship

Example: How Innocentive use 80,000 self-selected problem solvers

3. Participation through Passion – co-inventing with others based on passion rather than money as the motivator

Example: Free Sofware and Open Source projects

Ken Thompson also identifies four different degrees of collaboration:

1. Solowork – members doing same things at different times

These can be completed by single individuals without help. There is no division of labour and no concurrency.

2. Crowdwork – members doing the same thing at the same time

These tasks require multiple team members to do the same activity concurrently. Crowdword has a place in organisational teams such as team review meetings, brainstorming and team social gatherings. There is concurrency but no division of labour.

3. Groupwork – members doing different things at different times (sequential)

This is where a task is split into two or more subtasks that can be organised sequentially. Example: working on shared documents. There is division of labour but no concurrency.

4. Teamwork – members doing different things at same time (concurrent)

Requires multiple individuals to perform different tasks concurrently. Different individuals must do different things at the same time. There is both division of labour and concurrency. This is real ‘Teamwork” and requires the most complex co-ordination between team players.”

Ken is also working on a concretisation of these concepts through a new tool called Swarmteams, which combines and integrates internet functionalities from within the mobile, optimized for group communication and cooperation:
“Swarmteams allows for instant mobile group messaging across multiple channels; it spans cell phone messaging (SMS) and internet  messaging (IM). The main concepts are summarised in this link.

Winning by Sharing™ is the first publication from Business For Good (BFG), founded by Anna Pollock and Léon Benjamin. As described on their website, Winning by Sharing™ is about the dramatic changes in the nature of work, the emergence of the network economy and its implications for corporations, employees and portfolio workers. It describes the emergence of extensive, global networks of people who want to work and conduct business in completely different ways, which are at odds with the traditional nature of the firm and its command and control organisational structures.

Consider this book as news from the front; for those who belong to upstarts, people who’ve lost their jobs to offshore lands, the talent that is being forced out of large companies and the risk-takers among the big companies, who are willing to bet more heavily on the future than they do on the past.

Léon Benjamin writes that, “The internet has caused a fundamental change in attitude towards work and the realisation that a ‘career’ has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life. I now view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude – an attitude that everyone is going to need.”

He goes on to say that “Winning by Sharingâ„¢ is a modern hero’s tale – the story of an individual forced to leave the shelter of the corporate world and transform himself from a well paid “techie” to creative strategist, earning a living in fits and starts by using his wits, his imagination and drawing on his innate curiosity and powers of observation. Most importantly, it shows how individuals are taking control of their own lives and creating their own supportive communities.”

In the section about “WHY YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!”, we are told that “Employees, be they satisfied or discontent with their current job, need to read it to better understand how to survive outside the shelter of corporate employment. A complex and very different set of skills are needed to survive and thrive as an “emergent” worker. According to Spherion, this way of working – likely to involve over 50% of the working population by 2007, with 40% moving that way – offers its rewards but comes at a price.”

The latter, in addition to coming “at a price”, seems hardly credible: that 50% of the workforce will be “emergent” workers by next year, with 40% moving that way; incredible changes would have to happen tomorrow for this to come true. Unfortunately, it is predictions like this, and a – at times – naive optimism that detracts from another potentially excellent book on what we would all like to see the nature of work become. Living in Asia, I’m not sure how the lives of all the folks working in the rice paddies and factories here are set to change at all. My feeling is that this needs to be contextualized and moderated a bit for that segment of workers with the skills and inclination to go for it independently.

Finally, some chapters, while interesting and provocative, must be read to be understood and appreciated; e.g.:

The Future of Work: Chapters:

• HR stands for Hardly Relevant
• The unit of work is no longer a whole job
• Feast and famine
• Ki work – People on demand
• The network is female

Perhaps I should know what “Ki work” is, and I’m not so sure we want to perpetuate the male/female dichotomy stereotypes into the new “Network Economy”, where I’m frequently unsure of the gender of those with whom I am working, nor particularly care. Which is not to say that all this is not good, right-minded stuff, but rather that, like many similar books emerging, the authors might be well-served by spending less time in heady cyberspace, and perhaps spend a year or two traveling through Africa and Asia, sans laptop.

(reblogged from Lifesized)

A UK group called Involve do some great work on collaboration, the highlight being their publication of "People and Participation". This publically funded UK think-tank and research center, is another wonderful example of some of the good work coming out of Europe in this area. I used a lot of the concepts from within their document for a project i have been working on. It translated easily from a government focus to other sectors. Of particular strength was the unification of concepts with case studies in the field of participatory practise/ collaboration.

"People & Participation is the first publication of Involve, a new organisation focused on the practical issues of making public participation work. There have been many books and pamphlets about democratic reform. What is unusual about this publication is that it provides much needed practical detail, drawing on the experiences of over a hundred practitioners who have used new methods to involve the public in issues ranging from local planning to nanotechnology. Its starting point is that deepening and strengthening democracy depends on success in learning lessons about why some kinds of participation lead to better and more legitimate decisions, while others do not. The book shows that greater public involvement can greatly help in addressing some of our most pressing problems and countering the risks of distrust and alienation. But it also warns that too much participation today is superficial, an exercise in ticking boxes as opposed to good democratic governance, or is used to to justify decisions that have already been made. Participation works best when people feel that they can make a difference, when they have the time to fully engage with the issues and when there is a healthy relationship of mutual respect with elected representatives. It works worst when it is rushed, ill-informed and vague about the links to formal decision-making, or when it allows the loudest voices to dominate. There are no simple formulae or ‘off the shelf’ solutions to improving participation. Nor is participation a panacea – turning government into a permanent public meeting can get in the way of making difficult decisions. But in general, wider involvement is good for public organisations, improves their relationships with the public and reduces the risk of bad mistakes. As the book shows, there are some clear lessons to be learned about the methods that are more or less likely to work in different circumstances, and we are lucky in the UK in that there are now very many people with the experience and the enthusiasm to make participation work. It is rarely easy or natural for big institutions to open themselves up. But a more educated and demanding public is no longer willing to sit on the sidelines watching passively while the big decisions affecting their lives are made by politicians, experts and officials. We live in a democracy where political authority still resides, rightly, with elected politicians. But any democratic vision which stops at that point, and allows parties and politicians to monopolise discussion and decision making, is unlikely to be very legitimate – or very robust when the going gets tough. To their credit, hundreds of public agencies have taken the lead in trying to involve the public more actively. The priority now is to build on that experience and to build confidence that public involvement can lead to better, and more legitimate, decisions." "Too often, discussion of participation begins and ends with identifying methods. One-off events or individual methods are an important element of participatory processes, but they are only one part. Methods have probably become the main focus for people’s participatory working because they are the front-line for interaction, the ‘set piece’ in which institutions come face to face with those they seek to involve. But as with all front lines, their effectiveness is determined almost wholly by the quality of the planning that precedes such action, especially the planning of how to handle the results from that interaction (the products and wider outcomes), and how to link the initiative with wider decision-making processes and systems, particularly in democratic institutions such as local government. Specific methods thus form just one part of the overall participatory process, which will also need to take into account purpose and context. In summary, the key factors in participatory working are:

Purpose + Context + Process = Outcome

Purpose: It is essential to be clear what a participatory process aims to achieve. Ideally, the purpose will be explicitly agreed among all participants (“this is what we are trying to do�). Some participatory exercises may have a primary purpose (for example, to influence a particular policy decision), and a secondary purpose (such as to build relationships). The nature of the purpose contributes to the choice of methods.

Context: Every situation is unique, shaped by the issues, the people, history, location, structures of organisations and institutions taking part, wider decision-making processes and systems, and so on. These factors will fundamentally affect what can and cannot be done – and which methods will or will not work. Participatory working always needs to be understood in relation to the wider systems within which it takes place (such as organisational structures and policy priorities), especially external and internal decision-making systems. The nature of the context affects the choice of methods.

Process: The design of the participatory process is about planning how the purpose will be achieved (including which methods should be used and when).
The design of the process should always follow
agreement on purpose
– ‘form follows function’
– and understanding of the context (including how any eventual decisions will be made).
The choice of individual methods is affected by the nature and stage of the overall process.

In summary, therefore, the choice of participation methods has to be made within an overall design for effective participatory processes (however short or long term, specific or comprehensive) and will depend on an understanding of the context, and an understanding of what participation may be able to achieve so that the purpose of any single exercise (or comprehensive approach) can be clear and realistic.

The document has three main sections:
Introducing participation: Some of the issues affecting participation in the UK today (section 2).

Planning for participation: The key steps for ensuring that participation works (section 3).

Methods for participation: The characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of different participation methods (section 4).
This guidance places participation methods in their proper place in participatory working – which is as part of a coherent design with a clear purpose. The overall design will always be different depending on the particular context."

I especially enjoyed discovering the concepts of outcomes, outputs and their relationship to purpose.

Link: OnTheCommons.org | The Improbable Success of Nollywood.

David Bollier has a blog post at Onthecommons.org that takes a look the rising Nigerian film industry, and their more decentralized and more “open” distribution practices. (quote):

“Every week, about 30-40 new films are released. They are all sold by street vendors, directly to consumers, on videocassettes. (Nigeria doesn’t have any movie theaters.) The videos cost $3 apiece and rent for 50 cents. Although pirates in outlying areas of Nigeria sell illicit copies for $1.50, the industry is still thriving. Indeed, one might argue that sales of pirated videos is whetting the consumer appetite for legitimately purchased films.

Nigerian filmmakers release about 2,000 low-budget films a year, which rack up sales of $200-$300 million. (By comparison, American studios released 611 commercial films in 2005. India released 934.) The Nigerian industry employs about one million people, which makes it the second biggest employer after agriculture. A typical film costs between $30,000 and $100,000 to make, according to The Economist magazine (June 29, 2006).

A lot of Nigerian films deal with witchcraft, murder and other unsavory themes, and production values are often poor. But the stories clearly resonate with the Nigerian consumer. In fact, Nigerian films are so popular that they are watched throughout Africa; on a South African satellite television network; on a British pay-television channel owned by Rupert Murdoch; and on commercial airlines.

The lesson that I draw from Nollywood is that an open, decentralized marketplace with lots of participants is likely to be more creatively robust and competitive than the Hollywood blockbuster culture that we are now saddled with. In fact, doesn’t the Nigerian film biz sound a lot like the Internet itself? It’s a low-cost platform open to newcomers who have the talent to connect with audiences. Word-of-mouth beats out glitzy advertising campaigns. Internet-savvy creative rebels in the industrialized world may find something to emulate in the Nigerian film industry.”(end quote)

In my opinion, we started to see a similar industry grow for a time in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, with independent music record labels, magazines and distribution systems. And, in these areas, we now have “long tail” distributors (like Amazon, ebay, lulu, netflix, etc). So, it seems that we already have the infrastructure, and past examples of models like what Bollier is talking about above.

So, why haven’t these models emerged on a larger scale? I think this type of relatively distrubted and open media emerged in Nigeria because there was a void that needed to be filled. While, in the US for example, big entertianment conglomerates make it by comparison extremely easy to access their content. They tend to fill in and dominate all of the major voids.

However, the nicheing of consumer demand may be causing new “voids” to emerge faster than the large conglomerates can fill them in. This may then present more opportunities for a diverse and decentalized industry to emerge that can fill these voids and niche demands.

From commons-management scholar Elinor Ostrom:

Policies That Crowd out Reciprocity and Collective Action

“Thus, instead of proposing highly centralized governance systems, the best empirical evidence we can bring to bear on the question of building sustainable democratic systems for sustainable resource use is to design polycentric systems…. The essential elements of polycentric systems are mechanisms for generating information about patterns of interactions and outcomes and mechanisms for oversight and self-correction.”

from her essay in Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life edited by Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr (MIT Press).

What?:

A Swarm of Angels is about making a £1 million movie and giving it away to one million people in one year. By using the Internet to gather together 50,000 people willing to pay £25 to join an exclusive global online community–The Swarm–the project’s ambition is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film.

Who?: Team.

How?:

FUND / FILM / FLOW

1. Fund the project. Call for collaborators. Publicize and create marketing materials. Gather the first 1000 members. Develop the project and infrastructure. Start script development. Open the project up to more members.
2. Film. Collaborate. Develop scripts using a ‘wiki’. Crew through The Swarm. Funding drive for pre-production/production/post-production. Create marketing and final materials.
3. Flow. Master materials. Create spin-off materials. Publicize. Burn. Upload. Seed. Download. View. Remix. Share.

Why?:

I think people would rather pay £25 or so to be part of an entertainment experience for over a year. Especially one based around the creation of an inspirational, cult project. A Swarm of Angels has the opportunity to make a mark on film and Internet history.

In purely material terms, the social and networking benefits of The Swarm should be value for money enough. If you add to this the access to to the filmmaking editorial process, the planned Collectors Edition DVD and other Swarm-only merchandise, it becomes a steal.

Also, be sure to check out the ongoing conversation following the post that I made at OpenBusiness.cc. The issues being raised there, and ideas generated are important for understanding and success in peer-produced media.