Following up on Anthony DiPierro’s comments on my previous post, I realized that our disagreement in whether or not criticisms of crowdsourcing could be considered criticisms of open source was based on a definition. Given my own statements equating Wikipedia with open source, it seems we have a difference in distinguishing the definition of these diverse projects (Wow, that was extremely alliterative, though unintentionally so). I tend to lump them together, following Benkler’s definition of commons-based peer production, and therefore tend to believe that attributes of these varied production methods are more commonly shared. I think that anyone can quite readily criticize der Wiki (or open source) with educated and accurate points. I think the appeal of the sucker map and also the attempts at various people to throw Wiki on something and therefore expect it to blossom into a top-ten website illustrates just that point. But I also think most project originators on SourceForge have a sucker map in mind when they get started, and suffer similar results.
The real disagreement in these differing definitions comes to how individuals assume some kind of helm role, and whether or not self-selection proves to be an effective and valuable process. I’m of the opinion that all those fellows who think they can replicate Wikipedia need to reevaluate the project’s success. I think that Wikipedia emerged as a result of certain socio-cultural conditions (Literacy, familiarity with computers and the Internet, familiarity with the encyclopedic style of knowledge presentation) coupled with ease-of-access made possible by MediaWiki. Jimbo and Larry Sanger, following this argument, were just lucky. I think we try a little too hard to make rock stars out of everyone (I’d offer Richard Stallman as an example, who was by all accounts a coding whiz, but is a miserable epistemologist, despite his bombast and energy) when oftentimes the reason why a project, a company or a state succeeds are the result of external factors which made a particular product or ideology well-suited for success. The current efforts of Berners-Lee at trying to will the Semantic Web into existence is another example that comes to mind. It’s not determinist to acknowledge that many things emerge into existence, and are not created by strong-willed individuals, and woe to the individual who doesn’t realize when they’re dealing with the former and not the latter. I like to think of it as Gettysburg Syndrome, wherein Lee thought he could defeat the Union center through sheer force of will, rather than acknowledging that the time and place of the battle was against him.
But we all need to be careful not to turn this into a false binary. Sometimes a great leader does push a project into existence and sometimes a project is simply the expression of a particular zeitgeist, wherein the individuals are little more than determinist placeholders. The real question comes when we speak of specific projects and when we try to figure out which way particular mediums of production tend to lean.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 5:54 PM and is filed under Digital Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.