experts

Expertly filtering the wisdom of crowds

jim wilde — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:12:22 +0000

Organizations trying to capture the wisdom of crowds (employees, customers, partners) are using social networking software - web 2.0 technologies.

Most of these social software technologies, at least the ones we set up, use tags (think tag clouds), folksonomies, taxonomies, , voting, reviews, recommendations, and search. This makes it quick and easy for experts as well as cross-collaboration teams to quickly and easily filter through ideas.

"can the crowd replace the expert?" from InfluxInsights by Ed Cotton.

"Companies are already tapping into the wisdom of their crowds of employees and consumers hoping for gems that challenge the experts.

However, it's one thing to facilitate and collect all the input and its quite another to make that input great.

Collection alone is not enough, there needs to be another level added to the process.

This could happen if small teams cross-collaborate to make the initial ideas better, or if real experts are brought in and thrown into the crowd to extract and facilitate.

This challenge is the same for ad agencies, as they demand creative thinking from every employee, rather than just those with the word creative in their job title.

The old-fashioned brainstorming session might not be long for this world, real collaboration requires new processes, new skills and new tools and
technology."

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Wisdom of crowds vs. Wisdom of the few

jim wilde — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 16:17:44 +0000

The Washington Post has an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds vs. the wisdom of the few. The sites mentioned in the article are using social software to create communities on the net that harness deep smarts.

"The Top Pickers vs. the Pack"

"The notion of separating the best from the rest is heresy for those who advocate the wisdom of crowds. According to its proponents, a large number of diverse, independent individuals will typically outdo experts because even experts lack perfect information and make mistakes. But with a crowd, the many small pieces of information and perspectives held by individuals come together to form a more complete picture while the mistakes can cancel each other out.

Justin Wolfers, a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said collective wisdom -- reflected for instance in the stock prices set jointly by millions of knowledgeable investors in the open market, and in sports betting lines determined by large groups of avid gamblers -- is more likely to be accurate than Web sites claiming to feature experts. Someone must have a track record stretching back decades before it is statistically possible to conclude whether success results from talent or random chance, he said.

"Folks who look like experts today are very likely to be lucky," Wolfers said. "If they're conditioning it only on past history, it's likely to be a lost cause."

Academia studying collective intelligence.

The whole idea of collective intelligence or the wisdom of crowds is starting to get a lot of play on the academic level. MIT is one school delving into collective intelligence.

"While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies especially the Internet now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities."

The irony here is that the blogosphere and the open source software communities continue to push out new ideas and possibilities everyday.

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Talent Is Made - Not Born

jim wilde — Mon, 08 May 2006 16:51:35 +0000

"A Star Is Made", from The NYTimes, By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT

So says Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University.

"Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task Ã¢â‚¬ playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers Ã¢â‚¬ whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming Ã¢â‚¬ are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichÃƒÂ©s that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichÃƒÂ©s just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third clichÃƒÂ© as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love Ã¢â‚¬ because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better."

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Better ideas at work

jim wilde — Tue, 24 May 2005 15:48:08 +0000

Management's role in passionate users Posted by Kathy Sierra -headrushh. Kathy has a great post about absurd management policies that affect the way people do their jobs. As we introduce our enterprise blogging system to corp clients, many of the absurd policies (found in most companies) are getting challenged - in a good way: Bringing about changes that are knocking down the barriers that prevented employees, management, customers, et al from truly understanding what the real focus of the business was all about.Another problem in organizations is the so-called domain expert that impedes progress simply by withholding ideas and information and shooting down ideas of those that are less qualified. Michael Pollock - Small Business Branding has a great post Forget: I'm The Expert. Think: I'm A Fellow User, "...one of those people who just gets in there and hangs out with everyone else - all the other users. He's an expert on many things, but if you read his blog, you'll see much of it is asking questions and stimulating debate rather than giving expert advice."Even though I know a lot about enterprise blogging and implementing large scale systems - I ask myself "what can I learn from this experience" every day. I am always surprised because this simple approach opens my mind to new possibilities as well as the ability to listen to everyone.What's more, for businesses to compete today requires not just the intelligence of the few but the many. Group Rethink, By Michael Fitzgerald - TechnologyReview.com June 2005 is a post about the wisdom of crowds, the future of work, and using new technologies to connect people together.Here's a little feedback from a business that is using Ideascape, "...users getting overwhelmed with new ideas and the "oh my God effect". I guess you could call it shock and awe since we were never able to connect the so-called dots in our (laughing) previous life."Ideas are evrywhere!

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