I was reading a
great interview with
Ray Ozzie today, and i came across a part that I had to publish here. This is totally in line with my vision on what gridthinking could archive..
WK
Large-scale collaboration is one of the most interesting emerging kinds of technologies. Broadcast messaging, the ability to reach out across your enterprise and ask questions or interrupt people, is probably just the tip of the iceberg here. I’m reading The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 2004) by James Surowiecki, who talks about the long-recognized phenomenon that if you ask a lot of people a question where there’s a lot of uncertainty and then look at the mean tendency of the answer, it tends to be correct.
It’s like the audience lifeline in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Ask a question of the audience and let them vote on the answer. So the question here is, can technology help a large collective of people cooperate with each other, maybe pool their abilities and knowledge, to make more intelligent decisions? And, really, would we want it to if it could?
RO
It’s an intriguing question. What we already know is that MSN Search and Google and others like that have proven that the long tail of the Internet has answers to many questions. Many of us pose questions in the form of queries to these engines and we get back answers that you would never expect given the size of the corpus out there.
There have been several attempts to build systems where you pay people to answer interesting questions. I don’t think that they have done what you’re suggesting in terms of collecting the answer from a number of people and taking the mean. I haven’t seen that kind of thing, at least on the public Internet, succeed anywhere near the degree of the pure information-based one.
WK
The data-mining approach?
RO
Yes. I’m still more focused on the data-mining approach, particularly within enterprises, because I think one of the big promises of all of this technology is to make it easy for people to leave trails of artifacts that can be used later when you don’t really expect it. Groove Networks did quite a bit of work with the government, particularly in the realm of post-9/11 information-sharing across agencies. Again, the problem is that people hold information close to the vest. The promise is that we can develop systems where people create artifacts and query engines that can get relevant answers to questions at a time disconnected from when the information was produced. I think there’s a lot of promise in this area. I just don’t know what form it’s going to take.
Ray Ozzie is a great IT pioneer and visionary.
I have never been a real fan of Lotus Notes, but 'his' Groove software is really good and I love SSE!