Clive Thompson is preparing an article around the notion of “Radical Transparency” for an upcoming issue of Wired Magazine. For extra credibility on the topic, he’s posting his notes and soliciting feedback as he assembles his thoughts.
What a fantastic idea! An idea I’m sure will offer him some tremendous insight.
From the post:
Sure, ‘radical transparency’ includes the obvious stuff, like Linux and Wikipedia and MySpace other well-known ‘open’ projects. But I’m also talking about the curiously quotidian, everyday ways that life is being tweaked — and improved — by people voluntarily becoming more open. That includes: Clubhoppers hooking up with each other by listing their locations in real-time on Dodgeball; mining company CEOs making billions (billions!) by posting their geologic data online and getting strangers to help them find gold; Dan Rather’s audience fact-checking his work and discovering that crucial parts of his reporting evidence are faked; sci-fi author Cory Doctorow selling more of his print books by giving e-copies away for free; bloggers Google-hacking their way to the #1 position on a search for their name by posting regularly about their lives; open APIs turbocharging remixes of Google and Amazon’s services; Second Life turning into one of the planet’s fastest-growing economies by allowing users to create their own stuff inside the game; US spy agencies using wikis to do massive groupthink to predict future terrorist attacks; old college buddies hooking up with one another years later after stumbling upon one another’s blogs; Microsoft’s engineers blogging madly about the development of Vista, warts and all, to help sysadmins prepare for what the operating system would — and wouldn’t — be able to do.”
This paragraph is a doozy. From this list, you can see the power that social media has in harnessing the collective intelligence of “the hive”. I wonder if Clive will spend some time exploring how members of the hive are rewarded for their efforts. I’m glad that the mining CEOs are billionaires and that Dan Rather is forced to get his facts straight (I can think of a few guys at FOX NEWS that could use this “service” too). However, I continue to believe that there needs to be a reward model for participants in order to ensure longterm sustainability.
Clive and I are on a similar path, doing similar research. I started Radical Trust so that I would have a better understanding of the social media landscape by making public the research I was doing along the way. I can’t wait to see his final article.
Transparency or trust … either way, the notion is radical!
Tweet This!
Print This Post
One Response to “Radical Transparency”
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
March 5th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
[...] Collin Douma’s Radical Trust (how’d I get in the same list as this guy?) [...]