Interview Blog

The visionary debunker of lone visionaries thinks collective
intelligence can take on global crises, but not Platonic truth

Emily Gordon interviews The New Yorker's James Surowiecki, author of "The Wisdom of Crowds"

I met James Surowiecki in the late 1990s, when he was a freelance writer contributing to a diversity of publications, including Newsday's book section, where I was his editor. He now writes The New Yorker's weekly business column, "The Financial Page," which ranges widely over national and international business news and consumer trends and provides analysis of all of the above. His book "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations" (Random House, 2004) was a best seller; perhaps even more relevantly, the title phrase -- a play on Charles Mackay's 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" -- has become a familiar part of the lexicon.

Emily Gordon: Popular blogs, in theory, represent the will of the people, no matter how individually flavored they may be, and as we know, mass media, television and movie studios, and politicians are paying more and more attention to them. Does this represent a welcome acknowledgment of the wisdom of crowds, or are we simply creating and validating more "experts" who may or may not be true embodiments of the idea that the human sum is greater than its parts?

James Surowiecki: I'm glad that people in positions of power are paying more attention to what audiences, voters, etc., are really saying, and I think the boom in the number and quality of blogs is unquestionably a good thing. But I think it's important to distinguish between the rise to prominence of individual bloggers and the wisdom of crowds. You only get real collective wisdom when you have some way of aggregating lots of different individual opinions to produce a collective judgment -- the way at the race track all of the bets individual bettors make are put together to set the odds, or the way a voting system works. So while having some new voices get attention (the way the most famous bloggers do) is nice, it's a long way from realizing the full potential of the Net. We need more ways to put together the opinions of the blogosphere to get a picture of what people really think.

A social networking theorist takes aim at crowdsourcing

Manikant (Mani) Narayanan interviews Clay Shirky via telephone May 30, 2007.

Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor at New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program. He is also a writer, consultant and speaker. His work has appeared in Business 2.0, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

Shirky rides against the waves. He has spoken about the wrong side of "tagging," the "semantic Web," and other heavy-duty concepts.

Manikant (Mani) Narayanan: How do you define crowdsourcing?

Clay Shirky: It's one of those words where the definition is a little complicated. If I were to offer a formal definition, I would say it's an analogy with outsourcing, in which work previously done by company employees is offered to and performed by a group of people on the Internet.

Q: You have watched lots of sites transition in terms of participation — including eBay and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. How do you think the participation has changed?

A: The big change in crowdsourcing has been the introduction of money. In "Cathedral and Bazaar," (Eric S.) Raymond makes the point that Linus Torvalds was the first person working on free software who realized that he could recruit developers from all over the world using the Internet. So, since at least 1991, we had this model of distributed, nonmanagerial production, where groups of people come together and don't have the same boss and their salary is not their motivation for creating. That model is going on 20 years — in part because of financial lacking and in part because people were most adept at finding tasks they were interested in rather than what they were paid for.

What's new with crowdsourcing is the introduction of financial motivation on the part of people doing the work. The big question for crowdsourcing is whether this is a series of special cases or is this a general business infrastructure?

Marketocracy: Cashing in on Collective Predictions

Steve Petersen interviews Ken Kam and Mark Taguchi, co-founders of Marketocracy, via telephone and e-mail on May 31, 2007.

Like any other investors, Ken Kam and Mark Taguchi like to invest well.

In fact, Kam himself didn't even fit the Wall Street profile or obtain an entry-level analyst job, despite his Stanford MBA. But that's why he started Marketocracy, which allows anyone to establish a portfolio with fake money in order to apply their knowledge and develop a track record of success over about five years before their decisions affect the Marketocracy Masters 100 Fund (MOFQX) that any American citizen can buy.

Steve Petersen: Analyzing financial markets is a stressful and demanding job, and professionals with highly specialized expertise and access to pertinent information make high salaries. Further, many in the financial industry tout their access to massive amounts of live economic data that services such as Bloomberg, Reuters and Thomson provide. Why does Marketocracy feel that normal folks who lack access to such information can excel beyond or at least compete with the professionals?

Ken Kam and Mark Taguchi: Information is free, but discernment about what is useful information is uncommon and good judgment of what action to take is rare.

Access to “live economic data” from services is accessible to lots of people, and these data are becoming essentially free. Earnings calls and their transcripts are available free to anyone; financial reports and economic data are online. The real value is how to interpret that information and what actions to take. It takes discernment to determine what information is useful and judgment to decide what actions to take – these are rare skills. Firsthand experience in an industry can often help give discernment, but most so-called professionals rarely have firsthand experience in the industries and companies they invest in.

Marketocracy looks for those investors that have those rare skills – the best investors. Marketocracy’s “information advantage” is knowing what the best investors find useful and knowing what actions the best investors are taking.

The history of BarCamp and the power of community

Malcolm Levy interviews Chris Messina via telephone on May 26th

Malcolm Levy: Could you tell me a bit about BarCamp, how it started, some of the ideas around it and why you think the idea grew from its grassroots beginnings and where you see it today?

Chris Messina: Barcamp started in August 2005, when a friend of ours had been to FooCamp before, and he was waiting for his invitation and for some reason this time his invitation didn't come, and so he kind of suggested off hand, to a few of us, myself and Andy Smith, if we did our own little event. We thought it was a good event and there should be lots of opportunities for different people to go, instead of it being the same people all the time.

To give you some context, FooCamp is Tim O' Reilly's invite only event that takes place in Sebastopol, California. It's a yearly event, and basically 200 people go up to Tim O'Reilly headquarters and hang out and have a good time, and the event is unstructured.

Instead of complain about this stuff, we thought; why don't we do our own event and fork off on a new form. So, about six or seven days before Foocamp, we decided to get ten of our friends together and put it on and that would be that…and we'll call it BarCamp…FooBar. When we were planning the event we only had six days, so on one hand it was a significant task, but on the other hand we figured that it was a good challenge and we would see what we could do in that time period. As well, from my perspective as an organizer, I wanted to make sure we could document everything we did, so that later on, people couldn't complain about FooCamp again, but instead show them this alternative. I wanted to make sure that the blueprints for the event were open sourced and available for all to use.

Side-stepping Bureaucracy and Speeding Up the Patent Process Through Community Review

Stephen Walli interviews with Beth Noveck via e-mail, May 2007.

A major problem with the U.S. patent process exists. Currently, U.S. patent examiners struggle with a backlog of applications that run as long as 24 to 36 months. As a result of a lack of research, shortage of time, and increasing backlog, patents for unmerited inventions end up approved. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is seeking ways to bring greater expertise to the review of patent applications to help ensure that only worthwhile inventions receive the valuable legal status.

What follows is an interview with New York Law School professor Beth Simone Noveck, who leads the Peer to Patent Project and has been involved with it since its inception.

Stephen Walli: What was the motivation for the Peer to Patent Project?

Beth Noveck: The Peer to Patent Project grew out of the realization that the quality of issued patents might be improved if the patent examiner had access to the right information to make informed decisions about "patentability." That knowledge rests not with a lone bureaucrat in government, but within the scientific community.

Q: What motivated your involvement?

A: I teach intellectual property, constitutional law, and electronic democracy at New York Law School. When describing the patent examination process to my students, it occurred to me that what we understand about the ways in which technology democratizes processes of decision-making could be brought to bear to reform the intellectual property system.

The great enabler of crowdsourcing

Johannes Kuhn interviews Lawrence Lessig via telephone

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and society. His concept of Free Culture has become very popular, as well as Creative Commons. He is currently in Berlin where he is working on a new book, which is about the possibilities a more open copyright would bring for businesses.

Johannes Kuhn: After Kahle vs Gonzalez was refused to be brought to a revision recently, which are the next steps for bringing an opt-in version of copyright?

Lawrence Lessig: Right now, the 10th court of appeal in Denver is deciding on a related case. I am optimistic, because if they accept our view then we will have a case at the Supreme Court.

From the legislative standpoint we are still pushing to bring in new laws. I don’t think there will be a chance of new laws that I like to be introduced anytime soon. The Orphan Works legislation proposal of the copyright office will probably come into law this year, but it is very badly crafted.

What starts with the crowd ends in research and development

Randy Burge interviews Alpheus Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive, via telephone on May18th

Alpheus Bingham knew something big had to shift in the way invention and innovation happened at pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly. A top R&D executive at Lilly in the mid 1990s, Bingham, along with others, struggled to devise new ways to leverage knowledge to reduce the ridiculously high costs of developing new medicines.

Innocentive is now adapting its crowdsourcing model to the social philanthropy arena and beyond. It is a story for the innovation ages.

Randy Burge: Wikipedia says that Innocentive emerged, in part, out of a session of the Business Network at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). Did you get the idea for Innocentive while you were at the institute, or was it something you brought to SFI?

Dr. Alpheus Bingham: Innocentive was not "hatched" at the institute. I was involved in some brainstorming sessions on what is transformative about the Internet with some colleagues at Lilly. That was where the actual hatching occurred. Those discussions led us to file the business process patent that was associated with this effort and that is how the two names, Alph Bingham and Aaron Schacht ended up on that patent.

The role of the Santa Fe Institute had actually predated those events. We had been out to SFI and spent some time talking with Bill Miller at Legg Mason, Michael Mauboussin, and Stuart Kauffman. Stuart subsequently did some consulting for the advisory panel for e.Lilly.

As we were refining it, we were back in and out of the institute. Then, as we were launching Innocentive, we had some more sessions with Stuart. We brought our advisers from the incubator at e.Lilly to SFI to keep them informed. There was a lot of co-mingling that went on.

Taking note: the wisdom of invisible crowds

Becky Carroll interviews Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote Inc, in person on May 16, 2007.

Jack is a founder and CEO of Baynote, Inc. For eight years, he was SVP & CTO of Interwoven Inc. with executive responsibilities in engineering, products, marketing, strategy and vision. Prior to Interwoven, he was a founder and CEO of V-max America. Jack led operating systems and applications development at SGI, Sun Microsystems, Stratus and NASA for over a decade. He is a frequent speaker at major conferences and has appeared on television programs in several countries. He is a contributing author in "XML Handbook, the 4th Edition," "Online! The Book," "Content Management Bible," and writes regularly about key technology issues and trends. He is a board advisor for Santa Clara University, and the president of HYSTA, a premier non-profit organization for promoting entrepreneurship.

Becky talked with Jack about crowdsourcing information on websites. Customers are often reluctant to give feedback on the usefulness of website information, thus creating a challenge for web teams. Customers are even less likely to “rank” or “tag” useful items. This interview tackles this subject as well as using the “wisdom of invisible crowds^TM” to grasp the long tail.

Becky Carroll: What do you think is new about crowdsourcing and where do you see it going?

Jack Jia: I think crowdsourcing, up to this point, you can define it as the first generation of Web 2.0, as being very explicit crowdsourcing, which is really forums, blogs, and people coming to write things. That has been very useful in connecting a lot of people in the world together. At least from our end goal, the biggest missing piece is what we call "the invisible crowd." These are the people behind the website, the ones who don’t have time to write blogs, who don’t have time to write comments.

Making the Wiki Go Round

Achilles Lake interviews Sydney Poore aka FloNight, a Wikipedia super-contributor May 24th, 2007

Achilles Lake. What is your main motivation behind your Wiki work?

Sydney Poore: Making encyclopedic quality information freely available to the world. It is the basic idea that brings and keeps many editors.