Live blogged impressionistic transcript of a panel moderated by Jerry Michalski with JP Rangaswami, JB Holston and Joshua Schacter.
Joshua: there wasn't an a-ha moment for me, but i realized that aggregating opinion rather than people coming together to form an opinion was a decision making tool. In capital markets, even with bad actors and no ringleader, you get to converge on a true decision.
JP: the a-ha moment for me on social intelligence was dealing with the problem of multiple cultures and languages. When they transcended the you say tomato I say tomato barrier in tags. Anchors and frames were being broken. You just gave them the capacity to use the system, not telling them how to do it.
JB: understanding that people interact with computer systems in the same way and rules of engagement that they interact with each other.
Jerry: if you are in a culture of attaching powerpoints to emails tells you a lot. Clay suggested that some tools don't want their people cooperating and mechanisms that stop you.
JP: you don't prevent the gaming. you need the voting to be transparent, so people get used to gaming and there will be a consequence and the community will gang up on the gaming. if instead you try to prevent the collusion, you may prevent collaboration. in the natural world collusion happens so don't try to prevent it, just try to make it transparent.
Joshua: gaming comes from structural issues in the way these are built. Digg is designed to be maximally viral, low threshold, so there is no construction there of a people doing a thing. No identity, anonymous by default. In other systems, when you want to misbehave, you actually have to spend something (e.g. stock market). Over time with tools that have persistent reputation, in a richer system, more expensive to use, you can see what people have done and good ways to summarize someone. Some of these things we should make more explicit, some less. Because the systems are so small, it is the aggregate opinion of everybody, rather than a group you have chosen. Don't have tools for sense making of sense makers.
Jerry: older people in particularly are freaked out by the amount of transparency on the web, and in an older company they can say it is a fad and will go by. I'm thinking it is natural and this is a different way of being in the world.
JP: what we have been trying to do, and I've tried it in different directions, there cannot be anything more right than going outside-in with the customer view. One thing that bothers me, when someone shows you a presentation they are going to do the next day, and then adapt it before giving it as a result, in political environment. Instead someone should video what you are doing, put it on YouTube and use these tags so I an find it. The kids of today are more comfortable doing these things, in generating an idea, they don't need a crappy way of enshrining the idea.
Jerry: the value is exposing the asset, not locking it away.
JP: Creating serendiptious moments that aren't structured meetings that don't mean anything.
Joshua: The value they get is higher than the marginal cost of the thing itself. Reduction of transaction and search costs is part of building collective intelligence apps.
JP: Some of these search and discovery costs were build by the structure, the silos of the firm. And now we are able to reduce these costs that are internal.
Joshua: people turn to the social knowledge in the system, that is not in the computer.
JB: It goes back to how you implement it. You have to follow the social rules when you implement or the transaction costs are very high.
Joshua: Down that road lies a danger. Individual and network utility are different. Virality has a cost.
Jerry: once the information can be easily shared outside the group, they do. Sometimes outside the firm. Private tags for public data is interesting.
Joshua: at Yahoo we actually have a big mailing list culture, similar to the investment bank I worked at before, actually a healthy thing. There are things lacking in delicious like group making that would be better for an internal organization.
JB: real trend towards, for sake of relevance and avoiding overload, towards shared attention. A new sales person starts with 60 preloaded feeds. Motivation isn't control per-say, but to cut through clutter. RSS is the protocol, but its just your stuff. Help individual, not system, overload.
Joshua: forwarding as a pattern is a powerful thing, a gift. In delicious we bring down the transaction costs, by just bookmarking it. Creates a way to get news from my friends. Important that it is time-oriented, new things at the top, instead of relevant things at the top. But when things fall off the top we are still sensitive to time organization, need more tools to go back in time, time-based sense making.
Jerry: We have a lot of tools for flow, not not many for stocks that we can dig back into. Part of it is our cultural heritage. We hate Tivo because it kills their business models of flow.
JB: the more limited the use case, the more obvious the application and the more rapid the uptake. Need a more thoughtful understanding when deploying broadly about the social patterns.
JP: my experience is that the peopel who are saying they are overloaded are actually overloaded. Don't filter on the way in, filter on the way out. If people are using Facebook as the way to filter, fine. I use my newsreader for 300 blogs, but I do know the top 20 can point to the 280, giving me an earlier cut. If you have the right community and openness they will mutate the tools at their disposal to get you connected to the information you need to see. Relish that we can do these things better than before. Stop worrying about the overload because the tools are getting better faster.
Joshua: personally I don't use a reader and instead go to the place I want to read. Subscribing for me becomes another thing to do. Forgetfulness actually has a value. Any social system with individual, social and accruing to the system utilities. Too many systems say everyone come and get it, but kickstarting needs to be based on a utility for a small group first.
Jerry: A lot of zen here, you have to let go. You have yin, after a yang overdose. But now with emergent patterns these things are easy for this audience, but is counterintuitive for others.
Andy Morgan: is there a challenge to adoption in the enterprise for tools of social intelligence?
A fair chunk of the behavior in large organizations is keyed off of tribal behavior. An interesting optimization problem which we won't be able to do, but can design around it.
JP: The enterprise you speak of is one of legacy, historical perspective. My dad had one job, I had 7, my son may have 7 at the same time. With this change, there is a new government in how they interact with each other. Moving from the noun to the verb. The link, hint of relationship, has more power than the core data.
Jerry: potential energy vs. expressed energy in the artifact.
JB: with one customer that has mostly contract employees now, they get the notion that they can't have the command and control relationship. We gave them a way empowering the mobile workforce without control. But you do have to offer an ROI before you get bought.
Chris Locke: some thoughts bouncing off of this whole idea. You say social intelligence is the theme, and it may be a good thing. But there is a tacit unacknowledged or unconscious set of assumptions here, that we will have consensus on what is intelligent or knowledge. Hard to have a community of discourse once you have a community of millions of people. Or six. Think about tag clouds, where what is missing is new ideas.
Joshua: Interesting observation, but not a fair one. redistribution of power which relys on information asymmetry, knowledge is the opposite of that.
JP: never seen the kind of group think people have supposed. The interest and passion brings them together and the passion makes things emerge. Things come out of the network that were formed by the collective, through conversation and contention, not blind agreement or poor attempts at consensus.
Jerry: group think is possible these days, we need to learn more about how to use these tools well.
JB: the more you interact, the more your individual value, is a new thing.
I’ll say it up front: 
Recent Comments