Fortnightly Mailing

Bill Dutton's nine strategies for "bottom up" collaboration networks

Networking Distributed Public Expertise: Strategies for Citizen Sourcing Advice to Government is an interesting 38 page February 2011 paper by Bill Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute, aimed at policy makers.  The paper struck me as a thinking person's guide to crowd-sourcing, criticising the notion without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Dutton "challenges conventional notions of the wisdom of crowds, arguing that distributed intelligence must be well structured by technical platforms and management strategies", and analysing lessons learned from previous efforts in this field. The paper concludes with the following nine strategies for for fostering bottom up initiatives to harness distributed public expertise, with a paragraph of advice on each.

1. Do not reinvent the technology.
2. Focus on activities, not the tools.
3. Start small, but capable of scaling up.
4. Modularize.
5. Be open and flexible in finding and going to communities of experts.
6. Do not concentrate on one approach to all problems.
7. Cultivate the bottom-up development of multiple projects.
8. Experience networking and collaborating – be a networked individual.
9. Capture, reward, and publicize success.

The concluding summary is as follows.

Expertise is distributed geographically, institutionally and socially. It has become a cliché, but no less correct, that not every expert in any given field works for your government or any other single organization. In a multitude of cases across the public sector, expertise is often located closer to a local problem or across the globe - beyond the reach of government officials when, and where, advice is most needed. This paper explains how government can creatively harness the Internet to tap the wisdom of distributed public expertise, and points to a set of challenges, guidelines and strategies for realizing this potential for networking with citizens not only as constituents, but as advisors/experts.

There are many reasons that public officials will cite for not experimenting with innovations in distributed collaboration, but these concerns can be addressed and countered by a strong set of valid reasons for moving forward on initiatives. Success will be the best counter-argument. A wide-ranging set of small, but visible projects for tapping the wisdom of distributed civic intelligence could be an incremental step for radically transforming how governments connect with citizens as experts. To get these started, champions need to emerge that understand that their agency or department is supportive of their use of networking, and has a basic set of policies, procedures and guidelines that can be built upon and not reinvented by each initiative. Developing these policies and guidelines, and following nine general strategies, such as documenting existing success stories, provides a place to start in citizen sourcing advice to government.

Language development in a child - the birth of a word

Below is a Fortnightly Mailing post from four years ago. Now you can watch MIT researcher Deb Roy summarising what he and his team have discovered about language aqcuisition from their analysis of the vast amount of data recorded in the "human speechome project".

[December 2006] The 9 eerie images below are time-lapse pictures taken in the course of theHuman Speechome Project, "an effort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development for a single child". The project, run by the Cognitive Machines Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Deb Roy (with his and Rupal Patel's child the subject of the study) is taking place in a single family home that has been wired with microphones and video cameras, with the intention of capturing "virtually everything the child sees and hears ..., 24 hours per day, for several years of continuous observation.  This excerpt from the paper referenced below explains the rationale:

"In general, many hypotheses regarding the fine-grained interactions between what a child observes and what the child learns to say cannot be investigated due to a lack of data. How are a child’s first words related to the order and frequency of words that the child heard? How does the specific context (who was present, where was the language used, what was the child doing at the time, etc.) affect acquisition dynamics? What specific sequence of grammatical constructions did a child hear that led her to revise her internal model of verb inflection? These questions are impossible to answer without far denser data recordings than those currently available."

During the planned 3 years of the project over 300 GB of data will be generated per day. For a detailed overview of the project, see The Human Speechome Project [775 kB PDF].

"Pseudoteaching" - brilliant lectures can (and often do) involve this, according to Frank Noschese

Frank Noschese writes incisively - with reference to Walter Lewin's gripping introductory physics lectures at MIT - about about why a lot of apparently excellent teaching is nothing of the sort:

"The key idea of pseudoteaching is that it looks like good teaching. In class, students feel like they are learning, and any observer who saw a teacher in the middle of pseudoteaching would feel like he’s watching a great lesson. The only problem is, very little learning is taking place."

Noschese has several pseudoteaching links on his blog, and a useful RSS feed that aggregates comments on his blog relating to pseudoteaching.

[With thanks to Eric Mazur for the link.]