I was in charge of the big schedule board again. We had it up much faster this year with less tape failures. Technique is very important. And having 12 hands.

I learned how to play Bughouse in the first session. Two chess boards, four players, two chess clocks – and it turns you a bit nuts in less than 10 minutes – which proved just enough time for me to recover before the next hour.

I hosted the next session in the Bughouse room on Expertise Location and had a very engaging discussion around the problems of figuring out “who knows what” and how to keep track of that when you’re trying to hire or place people on teams.

I lured them in with an explanation of my thesis work around Contextual Authority Tagging and asked for input from the “real world”. I heard lots of encouraging comments about how my work meshes nicely with the movement in today’s knowledge management circles away from documenting our knowledge into files (separating the knowledge from the person who knows it) to documenting the people, their work, and simply keeping track of who knows what.

The group agreed that my ideas around tagging others’ knowledge is related to the 360° interview process and the Johari window and its concept of a “blind spot”.

“Everything is pointers.” The overwhelming consensus was that the real way people figure things out is by asking other people, and moving up the chain of expertise until the answer is uncovered. If Bill (who knows about X) doesn’t know the answers himself, he’ll point you to Dave. If Dave doesn’t know, he points you to the next person. This is how we solve problems and if I can help companies do that in a more efficient, documented, trackable way – then everyone agreed I’ve got a very marketable project – as soon as I write it all down, show that it works, and then defend it and get out of school.

The most interesting comment to come from the day’s talk was about a “persistent gap” that may prove itself to exist between what a person thinks they know about and what the group around them thinks the person knows about. Identifying if and when that happens would be a very interesting application of this technique and something I hadn’t really considered before. I’ve been working under the very straightforward assumption that there will be convergence between the three “lists” of terms/tags in my experiment:
- What I think I know
- What they think I know
- What I think they think I know

We’ll see.

The current plan gives me a year to write down what those who have come before me have already done (called the Literature Review) and a year to prove and then write down my own work (called the Dissertation).

Then of course, I’ll have to be a part of that “real world”. Hmmm…

We can spots duplicates. We can fact check. We can find patterns. We can dig up information that’s been buried under time and secrecy. Together we are capable of so much. The idea that the many are greater than the few is a powerful meme that we’ve harnessed quite well since the internet came to town.

However, it is not a panacea. Our wisdom of crowds sometimes presents itself as the yelling of the loudest. Our popular pages are just that, popular.

That is what crowds do.

They do not convey the nuance of discussion. They do not reward the facts in the face of widely held opposing opinion. The democratic freedom we’ve unleashed by having everyone be a publisher, everyone be an editor, everyone having the ability to leave a comment or post a response video has lowered the signal in many ways.

When the many start to yell, sometimes it’s not rational. Sometimes the voices of reason are drowned out. Sometimes the knowledgable and the educated are overpowered by those who are not. And this is not good when the subject matter is knowledge itself.

Crowds are good at giving their opinions. We should use them for that.

Experts are good at knowing things. We should use them for that.

We should not conflate the two – and we should be more aware of which one we want at the time we build our systems.

There is debate about the new service coming online in the next few days, Citizendium. The idea is one that the founder, Larry Sanger, has had for years. He wants experts to rule the knowledge, just like I’ve said above. He wanted it when he started Nupedia and he’s wanted it to be a part of Wikipedia from the beginning. He’s now going to fork Wikipedia and try once more. But it is a flawed plan as it stands. Clay Shirky explains why:

Sanger et al. set the bar for editorship, editors self-certify, then, in order to get around the problems this will create, there will be an additional certification and de-certification process internal to the site. On Citizendium, if you are competent but uncredentialed, you will have to be vetted before you are allowed to ascend to the editor’s chair, and if you are credentialed but incompetent, you’re in until decertification. And, critically, Sanger expects that decertification will only take place in unusual cases.

This is wrong; policing certification will be a common case, and a huge time-sink. If there is a value to being an expert, people will self-certify to get at that value, not matter what their credentials. The editor-in-chief will then have to spend considerable time monitoring that process, and most of that time will be spent fighting about edge cases.

What we need is a better way. A middle way. A way where the users are still in control and the administrators won’t be caught on the edge cases. A way where the users decide who to grant more power to and perhaps more importantly, in what context that power holds.

We need the ability to grant cognitive authority to one another and have it matter when the votes come in. When the discussion comes up, those who ‘know stuff’ should have a greater say. Same as in the real world. We grant authority to those who deserve it, and they use it as it was designed.

I’m working on it. Contextual Authority Tagging.

Contextual Authority Tagging is the use of folksonomy to discover and define cognitive authority through reputation within communities of users. Authority is granted by individual users to other individual users with regard to their perceived domains of knowledge via free text tags or labels. This allows discovery of at least two things, 1) which users in a group are authority figures on a certain topic area, and 2) what areas of expertise a particular user possesses. A basic proposal is laid out along with a few examples to foster communication and thought on this new distributed way to discover cognitive authority.

Do let me know what you (all) think.