mark-elliott.net

As part of One Web Day (a global event to celebrate and take stock of the value the web provides humanity) Future Melbourne took part, with Melbourne’s Lord Mayor John So as the 55th One Web Day ambassador, as well as hosting a event to communicate our experiences to those who are in positions to effect change in our local government towards participatory governance. It was my honour to be the keynote speaker for this event, talking about the wiki-base collaborative environment designed and built by my outfit Collabforge, as well as the experience of taking part in one of the world’s first large-scale collaborative endeavours for local governance. Here’s a video of my presentation:

It’s been a busy few months for me and have taken on a few new projects which I hope to talk about soon. Till then, peace out.

I made a brief stop in Howard Rheingold’s beautiful garden office while passing through San Francisco in early July ‘08. He interviewed me for his vlog on the topic of stigmergy and the recent City of Melbourne wiki my company CollabForge designed and developed. (Too bad I look as exhausted as I was - traveling with 2yr old twins is way harder than I ever imagined!) Afterwards we went on a splendid walk on Mt. Tamalpais - great views (despite smoke from forest fires) of the SF bay.

click to watch on Howard’s site

Alas, the end must come to all good things… I will begin a bit of a reflection upon the Future Melbourne project, framed as an investigation into the future of democracy, because, that’s what I believe it is.

One month later and today is the final day of public consultation for the Future Melbourne wiki. I applaud all who contributed - and note, I do consider simply browsing the site a form of contribution. In fact, it is often helpful to compare the wiki to a town hall meeting to get a better understanding of the forms of engagement that comprise the full spectrum of contribution.

For instance, those who actually turn up to a town hall meeting is a subset of everyone who had heard and possibly discussed the topic up for review. Then, those members of the attendees who ask a question are a yet another smaller subset. Similarly, those who browse the site are kind of like the group that turns up to the meeting, while the folks that take the time to register and edit the ones who ask questions.

Both sets are important and even necessary for each other’s existence. The dynamic where a majority of the input comes from a minority of the participants is referred to as the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 Rule). I’ve found this rule to apply in almost every f-2-f social setting where the group is larger than those who can manage a single sustained conversation (usually about three people) and where all participants are engaging in a single endeavour.

While some people argue the Pareto Principle as failing of human activity (the majority is always represented by the minority), I don’t think this is the case. In my mind, this would be like arguing that since an engine always requires fuel, engines are a failure since they can never run without it. Engines are very useful to humanity, and while some fuels are better than others, there’s a lot of ways to engineer and engine (however you’ll never escape the need for some form of fuel).

So in collective activity, the fuel is the ‘masses’ who build ignite the sparks of the minority. The rising of such a minority may be due to the dynamics of collective psychology, or, perhaps those individuals would always participate without the support of the majority. Nevertheless, the two seem always to be tied and therefore it makes sense to see the two as interdependent.

UPDATE (thanks Dale ;-):
During the period of consultation between 17 May and 14 June we received approximately 9300 visits to the site from 6500 people. In total, these visitors viewed over 48000 pages on the site.

During this period, approximately 200 individual edits were made to both the plan and its discussion pages. These ranged from new ideas to extensive well-researched contributions on the future of our city. The contributions will now be reviewed by the Future Melbourne team to organise, refine and incorporate the range of ideas into the Future Melbourne plan in the best possible way.

With regard to the Pareto Principle, this means that of the total number of folks who engaged the site (6500), 3.1% made edts (200)…

I’m quite excited to announce the launch of a project I’ve been working very hard on for the last 6 months: 

• Future Melbourne wiki - Melbourne’s draft city plan currently in public consultation.
• CollabForge.com - the company myself and Marcus Leonard set up in response to this project and spin-off opportunities (our website’s not much to see right now - been to busy to even think about it!).

Here’s some background:

A month before I graduated (Nov ‘07) I was contacted by the manager of the City of Melbourne’s Strategic Planning & Sustainability Branch - David Mayes. David had a vision for reengineering the City of Melbourne’s process for generating its next 2020 ten year strategic plan. Previously, plans were produced using co-operative participation. A requirement of this project was that the new plan be produced by collaborative participation.

What followed was several months of meetings in order to map the existing process and redevelop it with the aim of taking advantage of ‘Web2.0′ opportunities and the emergent capacities of mass collaboration.

Fast forward five months: the city’s ten year plan has been moved to a wiki-based collaborative environment for both internal collaboration, and public consultation.

• Facilitated by the wiki, the plan has undergone internal collaborative development by the City’s special team in charge of the plan’s creation, Future Melbourne, City officers, Councilors, councilors, and hundreds of stakeholders (compared to Sydney’s recently released plan which was put together by more or less a handful of people).
• The project launched its public consultation last Saturday, May 17th, and so far around 60 public participants have registered and there have been approximately 50 contributions to the either the plan directly, or one of the many ‘discussion pages’ associated with the plan’s content. While this isn’t the first project to use a wiki for public consultation, it is (as far as I know) the first in Australia. It is also the first (in the world as far as i know) to use a wiki so extensively in a city planning process. It is also possible the wiki may play some role in the life of the plan post Council adoption in October. But one step at a time :-)… 

Yet more interesting are the implications: could this be the beginning of participatory governance, where the public relies less on the elected representatives and is more able to directly engage in the creation and implementation of policy?

While it’s true that editing the city plan wiki does not guarantee that your contribution will still be there when Council signs off on it, there can be no doubt that a well considered opinion demonstrated in the context of the document (not just as a comment in the margins) will not only be more persuasive, but will influence the downstream development of the plan.

In other words, the wiki is the plan’s content, even post consultation, and whatever form it takes in the end, the publicly edited version will be a step on that path. (Imagine sending a story you wrote to a team of editors and having them not only reply with meta-level commentary, but also edits directly to your story. If this went back and forth enough times, you’d probably lose track of whose words were whose, and in the end, really only be focused on the merit of the content. Well this is exactly the idea and potential behind mass collaboration, ‘the power of the many’ - by putting the primacy on the merit of the content instead of the reputation of the author, bigger and more complex results can be achieved (Wikipedia has almost done in 6 years what Britannica took 230 to do).

Anyway, as you can imagine, I’m very interested to see how this phase of the project pans out - will the public rise to the challenge and exert their will, interest and newfound influence regarding the future of Melbourne’s development, or are we happy for others to make those decisions for us?..

Oh, and btw, if you’re interested in more information regarding CollabForge’s services, or Future Melbourne, or in having a chat about project ideas, please don’t hesitate to email me: mark.elliott AT collabforge.com.

Anthony D. Williams, coauthor of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, recently blogged my phd dissertation.

The post highlights the fact that Wikinomics was in fact the first text published on the topic of mass collaboration (as far as my research could uncover). It also highlights my criticism of the book – which must be taken in context, being that of a phd literature review. In this context each work must be critically reviewed with the objective of highlighting how your own work is unique and required.
The post highlights the fact that Wikinomics was in fact the first text published on the topic of mass collaboration (as far as my research could uncover). It also highlights my criticism of the book – which must be taken in context, being that of a phd literature review. In this context each work must be critically reviewed with the objective of highlighting how your own work is unique and required.

To this end, my critique of Wikinomics is mainly centered on the usage of the term ‘collaboration’, in that the book does not provide a definition as to what it means when using the term. This is of course not unusual (unless you’re writing a phd!) as most of us tend to feel fairly confident that we know what the word means. After all, a reader can always go to the dictionary if they feel the need, can’t they?

As an artist who has worked collaboratively for many years, I was quite surprised to learn that there was no ‘general theory of collaboration‘ or anything of the like to refer to when writing a phd on mass collaboration. Rather, having spent many years producing works which required creative engagement with others in the most intimate and complex of manners, I was forced to rely upon dictionary definitions, which were far too broad to use in the context of a phd. This lead me to do a fairly comprehensive investigation into the etymology of the term collaboration, as well as to interrogate the meanings I discovered. I found that what was once meant by collaboration – working with someone on the creation of a literary work – has modulated (esp. post Internet) to anything and everything that requires more than one person to achieve it – e.g. ‘collaborative filtering’ or ‘collaborative bookmarking’.

But are these newer references really collaboration, or are they yet another collective process? In my own experience (also supported by the etymology of collaboration) creative production (in the sense of artistry) is a necessary component of collaboration. This lead me to an investigation of creativity – what is it? – of course a huge topic in its own right. Sparing you the details, what I discovered was that there was an elegant way of distinguishing between coordination, cooperation and collaboration.

Simply put,

• coordination is required for all collective activities (bringing the parts together in a way that yields synergy),
• cooperation employs linear procedures to leverage collective potential (if each participant does exactly ‘x’, then a predictable ‘y’ is the result),
• while collaboration is different in that through nonlinear creative processes (no one knows exactly what they have to do until they do it, and even then the outcome is unknown) a shared understanding is created amongst the participants – one unique to those participants and that collaboration.

By way of example,

• coordination = a web search: bringing together parts of the web in a way that creates meaning, i.e. synergy,
• cooperation = social bookmarking: if many people tag their webpages using a particular platform, and a particular procedure, a resource much larger than any individual could develop may be generated,
• collaboration = Wikipedia editing: read an entry, contribute in any number of modes (form, content, discussion, etc) and from an infinite number of perspectives (the multiplicity of opinion and creative volition) one becomes part of a highly complex negotiation of a shared understanding (no one owns or comprehends the whole but contributes a part of it).

The below image represents the relationship between these three terms using the technical language developed in my phd (likely to require a bit more reading for context).

So thank you Anthony for the post (hopefully my criticism makes more sense now) and thank you especially for being so good natured about the criticism, as I really do highly recommend the book – especially as an excellent introduction to the incredible world of Internet-based collective activity and its many potentials and applications in the work place.

BTW, I wonder if my phd was the first on mass collaboration?.. Any others out there?