Markklein Interview Transcript
This document was uploaded by user and they confirmed that they have the permission to share it. If you are author or own the copyright of this book, please report to us by using this DMCA report form. Report DMCA
Overview
Download & View Markklein Interview Transcript as PDF for free.
More details
- Words: 2,948
- Pages: 7
Person interviewed: Mark Klein Interviewer: FAR Date of interview: 05/03/ 2009 Interview title: Thesis Research: Brave New Collaboration Towards a Sustainable Future Program or publication: n/a Broadcaster/publisher: n/a Klein, Mark. 2009. "Thesis Research: Brave New Collaboration Towards a Sustainable Future" Interview by Fei Rong, Alice-Marie Archer, Rebecca Petzel. 05 March. Glossary: “Social computing= any kind of computing that facilitates the interaction of many people towards coherent purpose which could be communication or aggregating information. Just a generic term that includes basically all this web 2.0 stuff.” (Klein 2009) Relationship between collective intelligence and collaboration for glossary or intro: “Collective intelligence is a more generic term than collaboration. Collaboration implies that you have people working together to achieve a shared goal. Collective intelligence includes any situation where apparently intelligent behavior emerges from many individuals, even in the absence of a shared goal. For example: Google sorts the results that you get according to whether the pages have a lot of links to them or not. When people linked to those pages, they weren’t trying to help google, but the creation of those links had the emergent effect of making google better. So google is tapping that collective intelligence.” (Klein 2009) Coins Strategic Towards Sustainability Sustainability challenges require more people involved in decision making: “I’ve been trying to focus my career increasingly on addressing how collective intelligence can help with sustainability issues. My sense is that a lot of sustainability issues we have can be traced to the fact that too small a number of people are making decisions that effect all of us, based on too narrow a set of concerns. Even when people want to take a broader range of concerns into account, it has been difficult to do because of the sheer scale of the problems and communities involved. My hope is that collective intelligence tools will help us make sure that the really critical decisions we face, about where we get our energy and how we get around and how we live, can be informed by a much broader set of
concerns such as the welfare of future generation, the welfare of the poor, environmental and social capital impacts in a way they weren’t before.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.1 How can we know when webbased collaboration is appropriate or Not? “If you have problems where a radical reduction in communication costs can produce a qualitative change in the kind of collaboration that’s possible, then the web can have a lot of impact.” (Klein 2009) One of the big lessons of social computing is if you reduce the costs enough so that small contributions become practical, then you find that there’s actually a huge reservoir of volunteer energy out there that people had been previously unable to tap. And I think that’s the secret behind youtube and flickr and things like that. The web made it cheap enough for people to make small contributions, and suddenly we found that lots of people want to do that. I think that was a big part of why the web has been important.” (Klein 2009) “In collaboration problems, it’s not necessarily always true that cheaper communication is the bottle neck. If you’re dealing with small teams under intense time pressure, where implicit communication is frequent and important, then at least with current technology the web may not be the best answer” (Klein 2009) Lowbandwidth interactions is what the web offers: “The web provides low bandwidth interaction between people; it might be just text or just voice but it doesn’t provide the richness of implicit communication that we can have face to face. And in contexts where that kind of communication is very important then lowercost text interchange is not really addressing the bottleneck. If you’re working out something with your girlfriend or boyfriend and it’s going to be a really deep conversation then it’s probably better to be in the same room as the implicit language is really critical.” (Klein 2009) How webcollaboration breaks down for complex, controversial issues “The key challenge that the deliberatorium tries to address is the fact that when you have large amounts of people talking about complex and controversial topics, then you tend to have some important dysfunctions, which makes it very hard to take advantage of peoples’ contributions and harvest the good stuff. In web forums, for example, you have a huge amount of redundancy, the content tends to scatter all over the place, the topic is not systematically covered, people get engaged in flame wars and periodically rehash the same old arguments about controversial topics. The signal to notice ratio tends to get quite low. So the output isn’t all that useful even though the low communication costs make it possible to get thousands of people participating. Wikis have different but still serious problems. People often engage in edit wars, and create simplified, leastcommon
denominator content for complex controversial problems.” (Klein 2009) With tools like deliberatorium, webbased can be better than face to face for complex issues: “Webbased interaction can be more effective than face to face, for large scales. One of the advantages of using web based tools is that they allow for concurrent activity. In a meeting, people’s ability to contribute is limited by the fact that only one person can really be talking at a time. In something like the deliberatorium, people can add their thoughts in parallel to different parts of the discussion” (Klein 2009) Brings more people around a complex problem to find a solution better for everyone: “My work with the Deliberatorium is part of a bigger vision that consists of two parts. Step one to provide tools to help large numbers of people enumerate the design space. The hope is that if you have more people involved then the design space will include more good ideas. Step two is to help people converge on the solutions that are most satisfactory, which is more of a negotiation problem. Those two elements, design space exploration followed by convergence, together constitute what you can call a complete collective decision making system. “ (Klein 2009) Deliberatorium is best for complex, innovation games, not zero sum games: There’s lots of different kinds of conversations you can have. One is a zerosum game, where you trying to decide how to allocate some limited resource. One persons’ gain is another persons’ loss. I don’t think the deliberatorium is especially well suited to that kind of problem. Another kind of conversation involves trying to uncover new ideas that make things better for everybody, in a domain that’s large and complex enough that the solution space is not obvious at the start. That’s really what the deliberatorium is aimed at. The deliberatorium is probably not suited, for example, for something like the Copenhagen negotiations, where countries will argue about the GHG emission targets they choose to take on. But it could be very wellsuited to the conversation about how to meet these targets, in terms of policy and investment and technology. That’s potentially a very rich openended discussion where ideas from the most unlikely places could end up being really terrific: a positivesum innovation game rather than a zero sum game.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.2 How can collaboration be designed to incentivize participation and break down barriers; i.e. what governance structures work best for collaborative projects in your experience? design participation around those motives: being a hero or finding your tribe, “That’s a very deep question the central question for social computing; the notions of incentives and governance. There are many different kinds of incentives that seem to draw
people into participating in social computing tools. Some of course have to do with direct selfinterest, advertising yourself or contributing to a project that you need the results of. But often the dominant incentives fall into two categories: becoming a hero, or finding your tribe.” (Klein 2009) “Finding your tribe is about people finding other people who share their interests and perspectives..” (Klein 2009) Being a hero is a way to make a substantiate contribution to a problem or a community that you care about. Those are both volunteer type incentives. If you want to get people involved, I think you need to find away to hook into those two incentives.” (Klein 2009) Be aware of cost benefit tradeoff. What’s the cost of contributing vs. benefit gained from contribution, signal to noise: “an important part of designing systems is being aware of the cost benefit tradeoffs that people face when using your tool. For some tools, like a web forum, it’s really easy to enter stuff you don’t have to think about where to place it or how to structure it so the cost of entry is low. The problem is that the value of the contribution can also be relatively low because what you enter can easily get lost among the hundreds of posts from other people. The deliberatorium asks you to do more work when you enter, so the initial cost is higher, but the chances of your post being seen and used by other people is substantially higher because it will be placed in a well organized structure with a higher signal to noise ratio. These tradeoffs are also substantially effected by scale. For a smallscale discussion, a web forum may be fine. For a largescale discussion, a more structured tool like the deliberatorium begins to shine.” (Klein 2009) Have two classes of users: “In terms of social computing governance structures one thing that has been working well is to have two classes of users : (1) casual participant who adds comments or makes occasional content contributions, and (2) meta contributors whose job is to maintain the utility of the resource as a whole.” (Klein 2009) In Wikipedia, for example, you have people who just author and people who worry about whether to lock articles or delete them, whether people should be promoted or kicked out. The latter are metacontributors. You have the same thing in other tools as well. So you want to have a way for regular contributions to graduate and become metacontributors so the community can be self governing. (Klein 2009) Reduced communication costs allowing small contributions: Makes it cheaper for small contributions: One of the big lessons of social computing is that if you reduce the costs of computing enough so that small contributions become practical, then you find that there’s actually a huge reservoir of volunteer energy out there that people have been previously unable to tap. And I think that’s the secret between you tube and flickr and things like that. The web made it cheap enough for people to make small contributions,
and suddenly we found that lots of people want to do that. I think that was a big part of why the web has been important.” (Klein 2009) Redundancy, lack of communication between groups: “I’ve heard a lot lately about how collective intelligence is what we absolutely need to deal with our sustainability issues, but work in this area seems to be scattered a bit now. I’ve been looking, personally, into how to facilitate more coherence in that community.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.3 What is the role of motivation, vision and trust in successful collaboration and what kind of leadership is needed Simple and compelling Vision: “It seems to be clear that the successful social computing applications have had a simple and compelling vision. Wikipedia has the mission statement ‘a comprehensive dictionary in your native language for free.’ That vision really got a lot of people excited. (Klein 2009) To keep trust, reward expectations: “Trust is also important. I think a big element is trusting that you can get what you expect from your contributions. If you’re expecting to find people that share your interests or you’re expecting to have a positive impact on some problems and if the system is set up so that contract is violated then I think people will abandon the system.” (Klein 2009) Evangelical leadership vs. maintaining leadership: “I think leadership is important in at least two ways. One is that every social computing tool has to get over the hump of getting a critical mass of participants. Often the way that that happens is that evangelists beat the bushes to get people to start contributing. Once enough people are contributing then it becomes self sustaining: people start contributing because others are contributing. But at first they’re doing it because someone asked them to. It also seems leadership can be important, as the system grows, in terms of helping to make sure the community rules evolve in a coherent way that most of the community finds satisfying. It does seem that at least initially you need someone with a clear workable vision of what those rules could be” (Klein 2009) Glossary: “Social computing= any kind of computing that facilitates the interaction of many people towards coherent purpose which could be communication or aggregating information. It’s a generic term that includes basically all this web 2.0 stuff.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.4 What are your recommendations for designing a business model around successful web based collaboration? What is the value added for participants of collaboration, and how is that value realized
two that Klein’s seen: advertising or subscription but this is not his field: “There are at least two business models out there right now. One is getting a lot of people coming in and then taking advertising. The other is the subscription model .” (Klein 2009) 3.4.5 What are your recommendations regarding legalities for webcollaborators? 3.4.6 What is the best legal structure to encourage openess? Are the commons always the answer? Do we have the legal structures available today to deal with international, web based collaboration on a grand scale? Creative commons good for common good, but not always appropriate: “I’ve assumed that the kind of sustainability conversations I’m focused on will have a creative commons flavor, but I recognize that other structures are needed when people want to maintain intellectual property.” (Klein 2009) Openness is value added of social computing with lots of benefits for the good: I think that openness the ability for larger numbers of people to participate in solving problems is the added value that social computing brings. It can have a lot of powerful effects for the good.” (Klein 2009) “I think there’s still a lot of hype and confusion around when social computing is the right answer. To a certain extent it’s trendy without people fully understanding when openness is a win and when it is a quagmire.” (Klein 2009) “But it’s clear that the openness enabled by having cheap internet communication has enabled radically new and powerful possibilities that we didn’t have ten or twenty years ago.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.7 What does your ideal ecollaboration tool look like? Do you have any favorite collaboration tools that exist? How can we overcome the limitations of current collaboration technology? Deliberatorium deals with complex collaboration problems: There’s lots of different kinds of collaboration you might like to do. The tool that I’m working on is just focused on one piece of it, on helping people systematically sketch out the space of possibilities for solving a particular complex problem. (Klein 2009) When selecting tools need to consider three types of collaboration, flow, fit or share (FIT IS WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT and where we don’t have the tools yet! Where Wikipedia breaks in to flamewars and wasteful argumentation): “Different types of collaboration: One way to look at it is that there are kind of three generic ways that people can interact: Flow, fit, share. Flow means getting information from one person to the next in the proper sequence, for example when you’re processing applications in an insurance company. You can use work flow tools for something like that. Sharing is
where you want to allocate resources to the people who want them. You can broadcast replicable resources, as in flickr or youtube, or you can use things like online auctions for limited resources. Fit: that’s where you have multiple individuals each making interdependent decisions the value of the decisions they take are impacted by the decisions made by other people. If I change the design of a carburator, for example, that impacts on what the engine design should ideally be. For that kind of situation, you have to ensure that the decisions being made by different individuals fit together to produce a whole that achieves the goals that you want. That’s the most challenging kind of coordination, and the least well addressed by current technology. (Klein 2009) Tool evaluations What is Deliberatorium?: The deliberatorium focuses on helping people create deliberation maps for complex problems. The collaboratorium is focused on using simulations to help people decide what to do with regards with green house gas emission targets.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.8 How do you see the future of ecollaboration? Do you think the web is the best tool to facilitate collaborative innovation for sustainability? Do we need something else? What real world mechanisms do you forsee necessary, running in parallel / supporting e collaboration? Need better education around challenges: “There are many parts to the challenge. You have to make people more informed about how decisions impact them so they’re more likely to talk about those things with the people who actually make those decisions.” (Klein 2009) “We also need to make it possible for people to see what the options are, to share the options that they’re aware of with each other, to offer their perspectives on which options are good and which aren’t, and have ways to have all these things be combined into the decisions that we make as a species.” (Klein 2009)
concerns such as the welfare of future generation, the welfare of the poor, environmental and social capital impacts in a way they weren’t before.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.1 How can we know when webbased collaboration is appropriate or Not? “If you have problems where a radical reduction in communication costs can produce a qualitative change in the kind of collaboration that’s possible, then the web can have a lot of impact.” (Klein 2009) One of the big lessons of social computing is if you reduce the costs enough so that small contributions become practical, then you find that there’s actually a huge reservoir of volunteer energy out there that people had been previously unable to tap. And I think that’s the secret behind youtube and flickr and things like that. The web made it cheap enough for people to make small contributions, and suddenly we found that lots of people want to do that. I think that was a big part of why the web has been important.” (Klein 2009) “In collaboration problems, it’s not necessarily always true that cheaper communication is the bottle neck. If you’re dealing with small teams under intense time pressure, where implicit communication is frequent and important, then at least with current technology the web may not be the best answer” (Klein 2009) Lowbandwidth interactions is what the web offers: “The web provides low bandwidth interaction between people; it might be just text or just voice but it doesn’t provide the richness of implicit communication that we can have face to face. And in contexts where that kind of communication is very important then lowercost text interchange is not really addressing the bottleneck. If you’re working out something with your girlfriend or boyfriend and it’s going to be a really deep conversation then it’s probably better to be in the same room as the implicit language is really critical.” (Klein 2009) How webcollaboration breaks down for complex, controversial issues “The key challenge that the deliberatorium tries to address is the fact that when you have large amounts of people talking about complex and controversial topics, then you tend to have some important dysfunctions, which makes it very hard to take advantage of peoples’ contributions and harvest the good stuff. In web forums, for example, you have a huge amount of redundancy, the content tends to scatter all over the place, the topic is not systematically covered, people get engaged in flame wars and periodically rehash the same old arguments about controversial topics. The signal to notice ratio tends to get quite low. So the output isn’t all that useful even though the low communication costs make it possible to get thousands of people participating. Wikis have different but still serious problems. People often engage in edit wars, and create simplified, leastcommon
denominator content for complex controversial problems.” (Klein 2009) With tools like deliberatorium, webbased can be better than face to face for complex issues: “Webbased interaction can be more effective than face to face, for large scales. One of the advantages of using web based tools is that they allow for concurrent activity. In a meeting, people’s ability to contribute is limited by the fact that only one person can really be talking at a time. In something like the deliberatorium, people can add their thoughts in parallel to different parts of the discussion” (Klein 2009) Brings more people around a complex problem to find a solution better for everyone: “My work with the Deliberatorium is part of a bigger vision that consists of two parts. Step one to provide tools to help large numbers of people enumerate the design space. The hope is that if you have more people involved then the design space will include more good ideas. Step two is to help people converge on the solutions that are most satisfactory, which is more of a negotiation problem. Those two elements, design space exploration followed by convergence, together constitute what you can call a complete collective decision making system. “ (Klein 2009) Deliberatorium is best for complex, innovation games, not zero sum games: There’s lots of different kinds of conversations you can have. One is a zerosum game, where you trying to decide how to allocate some limited resource. One persons’ gain is another persons’ loss. I don’t think the deliberatorium is especially well suited to that kind of problem. Another kind of conversation involves trying to uncover new ideas that make things better for everybody, in a domain that’s large and complex enough that the solution space is not obvious at the start. That’s really what the deliberatorium is aimed at. The deliberatorium is probably not suited, for example, for something like the Copenhagen negotiations, where countries will argue about the GHG emission targets they choose to take on. But it could be very wellsuited to the conversation about how to meet these targets, in terms of policy and investment and technology. That’s potentially a very rich openended discussion where ideas from the most unlikely places could end up being really terrific: a positivesum innovation game rather than a zero sum game.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.2 How can collaboration be designed to incentivize participation and break down barriers; i.e. what governance structures work best for collaborative projects in your experience? design participation around those motives: being a hero or finding your tribe, “That’s a very deep question the central question for social computing; the notions of incentives and governance. There are many different kinds of incentives that seem to draw
people into participating in social computing tools. Some of course have to do with direct selfinterest, advertising yourself or contributing to a project that you need the results of. But often the dominant incentives fall into two categories: becoming a hero, or finding your tribe.” (Klein 2009) “Finding your tribe is about people finding other people who share their interests and perspectives..” (Klein 2009) Being a hero is a way to make a substantiate contribution to a problem or a community that you care about. Those are both volunteer type incentives. If you want to get people involved, I think you need to find away to hook into those two incentives.” (Klein 2009) Be aware of cost benefit tradeoff. What’s the cost of contributing vs. benefit gained from contribution, signal to noise: “an important part of designing systems is being aware of the cost benefit tradeoffs that people face when using your tool. For some tools, like a web forum, it’s really easy to enter stuff you don’t have to think about where to place it or how to structure it so the cost of entry is low. The problem is that the value of the contribution can also be relatively low because what you enter can easily get lost among the hundreds of posts from other people. The deliberatorium asks you to do more work when you enter, so the initial cost is higher, but the chances of your post being seen and used by other people is substantially higher because it will be placed in a well organized structure with a higher signal to noise ratio. These tradeoffs are also substantially effected by scale. For a smallscale discussion, a web forum may be fine. For a largescale discussion, a more structured tool like the deliberatorium begins to shine.” (Klein 2009) Have two classes of users: “In terms of social computing governance structures one thing that has been working well is to have two classes of users : (1) casual participant who adds comments or makes occasional content contributions, and (2) meta contributors whose job is to maintain the utility of the resource as a whole.” (Klein 2009) In Wikipedia, for example, you have people who just author and people who worry about whether to lock articles or delete them, whether people should be promoted or kicked out. The latter are metacontributors. You have the same thing in other tools as well. So you want to have a way for regular contributions to graduate and become metacontributors so the community can be self governing. (Klein 2009) Reduced communication costs allowing small contributions: Makes it cheaper for small contributions: One of the big lessons of social computing is that if you reduce the costs of computing enough so that small contributions become practical, then you find that there’s actually a huge reservoir of volunteer energy out there that people have been previously unable to tap. And I think that’s the secret between you tube and flickr and things like that. The web made it cheap enough for people to make small contributions,
and suddenly we found that lots of people want to do that. I think that was a big part of why the web has been important.” (Klein 2009) Redundancy, lack of communication between groups: “I’ve heard a lot lately about how collective intelligence is what we absolutely need to deal with our sustainability issues, but work in this area seems to be scattered a bit now. I’ve been looking, personally, into how to facilitate more coherence in that community.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.3 What is the role of motivation, vision and trust in successful collaboration and what kind of leadership is needed Simple and compelling Vision: “It seems to be clear that the successful social computing applications have had a simple and compelling vision. Wikipedia has the mission statement ‘a comprehensive dictionary in your native language for free.’ That vision really got a lot of people excited. (Klein 2009) To keep trust, reward expectations: “Trust is also important. I think a big element is trusting that you can get what you expect from your contributions. If you’re expecting to find people that share your interests or you’re expecting to have a positive impact on some problems and if the system is set up so that contract is violated then I think people will abandon the system.” (Klein 2009) Evangelical leadership vs. maintaining leadership: “I think leadership is important in at least two ways. One is that every social computing tool has to get over the hump of getting a critical mass of participants. Often the way that that happens is that evangelists beat the bushes to get people to start contributing. Once enough people are contributing then it becomes self sustaining: people start contributing because others are contributing. But at first they’re doing it because someone asked them to. It also seems leadership can be important, as the system grows, in terms of helping to make sure the community rules evolve in a coherent way that most of the community finds satisfying. It does seem that at least initially you need someone with a clear workable vision of what those rules could be” (Klein 2009) Glossary: “Social computing= any kind of computing that facilitates the interaction of many people towards coherent purpose which could be communication or aggregating information. It’s a generic term that includes basically all this web 2.0 stuff.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.4 What are your recommendations for designing a business model around successful web based collaboration? What is the value added for participants of collaboration, and how is that value realized
two that Klein’s seen: advertising or subscription but this is not his field: “There are at least two business models out there right now. One is getting a lot of people coming in and then taking advertising. The other is the subscription model .” (Klein 2009) 3.4.5 What are your recommendations regarding legalities for webcollaborators? 3.4.6 What is the best legal structure to encourage openess? Are the commons always the answer? Do we have the legal structures available today to deal with international, web based collaboration on a grand scale? Creative commons good for common good, but not always appropriate: “I’ve assumed that the kind of sustainability conversations I’m focused on will have a creative commons flavor, but I recognize that other structures are needed when people want to maintain intellectual property.” (Klein 2009) Openness is value added of social computing with lots of benefits for the good: I think that openness the ability for larger numbers of people to participate in solving problems is the added value that social computing brings. It can have a lot of powerful effects for the good.” (Klein 2009) “I think there’s still a lot of hype and confusion around when social computing is the right answer. To a certain extent it’s trendy without people fully understanding when openness is a win and when it is a quagmire.” (Klein 2009) “But it’s clear that the openness enabled by having cheap internet communication has enabled radically new and powerful possibilities that we didn’t have ten or twenty years ago.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.7 What does your ideal ecollaboration tool look like? Do you have any favorite collaboration tools that exist? How can we overcome the limitations of current collaboration technology? Deliberatorium deals with complex collaboration problems: There’s lots of different kinds of collaboration you might like to do. The tool that I’m working on is just focused on one piece of it, on helping people systematically sketch out the space of possibilities for solving a particular complex problem. (Klein 2009) When selecting tools need to consider three types of collaboration, flow, fit or share (FIT IS WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT and where we don’t have the tools yet! Where Wikipedia breaks in to flamewars and wasteful argumentation): “Different types of collaboration: One way to look at it is that there are kind of three generic ways that people can interact: Flow, fit, share. Flow means getting information from one person to the next in the proper sequence, for example when you’re processing applications in an insurance company. You can use work flow tools for something like that. Sharing is
where you want to allocate resources to the people who want them. You can broadcast replicable resources, as in flickr or youtube, or you can use things like online auctions for limited resources. Fit: that’s where you have multiple individuals each making interdependent decisions the value of the decisions they take are impacted by the decisions made by other people. If I change the design of a carburator, for example, that impacts on what the engine design should ideally be. For that kind of situation, you have to ensure that the decisions being made by different individuals fit together to produce a whole that achieves the goals that you want. That’s the most challenging kind of coordination, and the least well addressed by current technology. (Klein 2009) Tool evaluations What is Deliberatorium?: The deliberatorium focuses on helping people create deliberation maps for complex problems. The collaboratorium is focused on using simulations to help people decide what to do with regards with green house gas emission targets.” (Klein 2009) 3.4.8 How do you see the future of ecollaboration? Do you think the web is the best tool to facilitate collaborative innovation for sustainability? Do we need something else? What real world mechanisms do you forsee necessary, running in parallel / supporting e collaboration? Need better education around challenges: “There are many parts to the challenge. You have to make people more informed about how decisions impact them so they’re more likely to talk about those things with the people who actually make those decisions.” (Klein 2009) “We also need to make it possible for people to see what the options are, to share the options that they’re aware of with each other, to offer their perspectives on which options are good and which aren’t, and have ways to have all these things be combined into the decisions that we make as a species.” (Klein 2009)
Related Documents
Markklein Interview Transcript
April 2020 0
Interview Transcript
November 2019 6
Interview Transcript
April 2020 4
Interview Transcript
April 2020 2
Nypd Perino Interview Transcript
May 2020 3