I was surprised to read in Dan Wood's article, "The Myth of Crowdsourcing", his biggest objection to the use of the world "crowd" is that it is a "blow to the image of the heroic inventor". I found this particularly surprising in that Dan, according to his bio, is a technology guy.
Technology scholars have dismissed the concept of the Heroic Inventor. Historically, the identification of a specific Heroic Inventor was an easy way to publicly announce and geographically identify the emergences of new technologies often for bragging rights. We all learned in our history books that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, and even that Henry Ford invented to automobile.
The rejection of the concept of the Heroic Inventor is not to take away the remarkable contributions that they were at the helm of, but to put it in a more realistic perspective, the perspective of the group. These major technological milestones were a combination of their directed efforts, the efforts of some of their contemporaries, the efforts of their employees, and the efforts of others that had come before them.
These discoveries were not so much discrete entities discovered by a single individual, but the final outcome of a process that included layers of individual, institutional, and group directed efforts.
Edison wasn't the first to tinker with the light bulb, technology predating Morse's could be traced back 70 years to England, and the first patent for an automobile in this country was in Maryland in 1787. They were and still are all great men, but the concept of them alone in their workshops independent of any prior knowledge or even help is an incorrect one.
Give credit where credit is due. Give credit to the great men whose shoulders they stoop upon, and to the contribution of the crowd, now rendered historically anonymous, due to the decades of hero worship bestowed upon these inventors.
Dan seems to be taking a purely reductionists approach. Taken that way to it's extreme everything is individual effort.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you he is undervaluing the crowd.
I think it's worth identifying different ways crowd work.
Learning from other's history or best practices.
Parallel pathing having multiple people chase down multiple paths that may each yield different results.
Synergy a word overused for hype but accurately describes when the group is of greater effect than the individuals.
Review and revision for quality and accuracy are nearly always more effective when someone else is overlooking your work.
Dan's examples all show these properties to varying degrees.