Geekly Articles each Day
📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

How to build a community. Translation of the book "Social Architecture": Preface. Crowd wisdom

image In The Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Libya, Niccolò Machiavelli has the following lines:
“As for prudence and constancy, I assure you that the people are more constant and much more prudent than any sovereign. It is not without reason that the voice of the people is compared with the voice of God: in their predictions public opinion achieves such amazing results that it seems as if the people clearly foresee. ”

In his book, The Wisdom of the Crowd, James Šurovieski wrote: “under the right conditions, groups can be very smart, and often can be much smarter than even the smartest person within a group.” He noted that collective intelligence usually shows better results than a small group of experts, even if group members do not own all the facts or behave irrationally, acting in their own way.

In other words, an average group of random people will be smarter than a few experts. This thesis is contrary to common sense and looks like a mockery of wisdom accumulated over the centuries. Experts in the field of human intelligence (sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists) met the ideas of Shurovyeski with far from open arms. He went further: “by adding to the group of specialists, you will make it more stupid, and by adding amateurs, you will again raise its intellectual level. Like any recipe, this only works under certain circumstances. ”

I stumbled upon Shurovyeski when I began working on a universal recipe for building communities. And immediately saw that his work closely echoes my own observations, and that I can make her a test. I had the opportunity not only to apply, but also to run his ideas on many communities and to search for their refutation: everything is scientific.

This intention gave rise to the process of building smart, self-governing, successful online communities, which were repeatedly ahead of expert groups. I called this discipline Social Architecture, which allowed me to call myself “Social Architect” for a while (today I’m a writer trying to get through, it sounds more romantic).
')
Social Architecture, by analogy with the usual architecture, is a process and the result of planning, developing and establishing an online community. Social architecture in the form of online communities is a cultural and political symbols and works of art of the digital society. The 21st century will be marked by the birth of Social Architects.

Successful online communities are usually based on a mutual benefit agreement, implied or explicit. Those. This is an opportunity to build a billion-dollar business based on the voluntary work of participants acting out of selfish motives. Often, participants do not realize or attach importance to the fact that they are part of a community. However, the motive of any of our actions - getting benefits. Crowdsourcing is the exploitation of voluntary labor for profit. And it only works when the crowd really wants to solve the problem you threw up or that it found.

Wiser and more constant than any sovereign


Machiavelli did not give explanations or evidence of his observation. However, the understanding that the collective will is infallible and fair - vox populi, vox Dei - permeates modern culture. It supports our belief in democracy and justifies our demands for transparency and access to information. This is the basis of the modern economy, whose constituent parts are freedom of choice and trade.

Šurovieski identified four elements necessary for a smart crowd: diversity of opinions, independence of members from each other, decentralization, and effective ways to aggregate opinions. He describes an exemplary smart crowd as consisting of many independent-minded individuals who are closely related, geographically and socially separated, impartial to the subject, many of whom are available to each source of information, and who have some ability to combine their individual judgments into one collective decision.

According to Shurovyesky, smart crowds make more accurate and fast decisions, self-organize for better use of resources and cooperate without central authority. Some examples of smart crowds, such as Wikipedia, have been extremely successful, despite intense and incessant criticism from negativists and attacks by vandals and rivals. These ideas are so exciting that we can only guess why we are not seeing more and more smart crowds. In fact, why is the world widening with stupidity, when wisdom is so possible, so close?

There are many good explanations for the stupidity of many crowds, and I will explore this issue in detail in my book Culture and Empire, from where this part was taken. Few people tried to explain the stupidity of the crowd in terms of collective intelligence. And without a clear understanding of the right action, how can we hope to explain the wrong?

Therefore, the apparent failure of the collective mind convinces many that it is only a funny theory that is not applicable in practice. And yet, if we look at online communities, for example, those that form around a popular open-source software project like ZeroMQ, we will see groups that are very similar to Shurovyeski's described crowds. And while it may be difficult to recognize smart crowds in real life, it seems that they are the dominant online model. Samples and errors allowed the digital society to rediscover the principles of the smart crowd and adopt them as their basic principles of action.

The solution to the digital society of the ancient problem of corrupt government is elegant and successful. There are literally millions of communities, each of which relies on the power of its founders. Citizens of digital society are free to choose which authorities to respect and which to ignore. The main focus is to take power without endowing it with the “right” to command.

In addition, there is fierce competition to create a fair government, which would not command, and forced to observe the necessary rules. This is an explosive truth. Generations that will become familiar with this model will not agree - even under the threat of death - to respect the model of an industrial society, where, if necessary, iron curtains and armed border guards, where citizens literally belong to the State, can be used for persuasion.

Origins of Social Architecture


I put a lot of money on Social Architecture and got a decent profit. It is close to rigorous social scientific disciplines, on the side of which are years of replicable experiments on real cases and research of existing communities. It mixes psychology, economics, political science, technology, humanism and optimism into something that I discovered can make many people happy.

My journey into the area of ​​Social Architecture began in the late 1990s with a book on how cults exploit our social instincts. Sects - not a pleasant place, of course. However, people are drawn into them because we are all social animals, which for the last million years have developed the instinct of uniting and forming groups for the sake of survival. Willingness to respect power, to obey the rules, learn common languages ​​and adapt to common behavior has become second nature for us. Sects subject their members to ideological treatment, playing on these instincts. They share members with their families, eliminate solitude, overload jargon, create despotic rule, randomly punish and reward.

Similarly, sects can turn most ordinary people into thoughtless followers who voluntarily empty their bank accounts, steal from their relatives and work for years without demanding payment. While still a student, watching the disappearances of random friends in the dungeons of Scientology and other cults, it all seemed to me to be something malignant and inexplicable. Later, when my closest cousin fell out of life and spent five years of his life on Scientology, for me this topic became personal.

Studying the materials of the Cult Information Center (CIC) site, it suddenly struck me that all these brainwashing techniques have several features in common. First, they are specifically aimed at destroying what makes us strong — they attack independent thinking and behavior. Secondly, they remind me of the situation in which I had to work (large business often resembles a sect in its activities). Third, it seemed that they were all reversible, i.e. they can be used in the opposite direction for good deeds.

The last observation is unusual. If a hammer breaks a window, then something is unlikely to change if you turn the hammer. But in some examples it is clearly visible. Here is one of the techniques from the CIC website: "Social pressure in a group: suppress doubt and resistance to new ideas, playing on the need for belonging to a group." Reverse - reducing the cost of joining and leaving the group will contribute to the emergence of new ideas and criticism. ” Or, “Exception of solitude - the ability to give a logical assessment will decrease if there is no opportunity to think in private.” Her reverse: “give people space and time for solitude, and they will become more logical to think.”

My conclusions are persistent. We survive by joining groups, following others, and trying to understand the world. Some groups exist due to the domestication of us and the reduction to the level of animals. Others give us freedom and allow us to become stronger, smarter and more independent.

In 2000, the Internet was not yet cheap enough for the masses, and the open-source communities were small, regional, centered around universities. Open source communities such as the Debian Foundation still function as classical non-profit organizations, as legal entities with the board of directors, treasurers, etc.
In 2005, I became a member of a number of joint projects. On the one hand, I was involved in the FFII project, which aims to combat software patents in Europe. We (the good guys) spoke in the European Parliament, argued with the European Patent Office (the bad guys), organized seminars, proposed amendments, collected votes and, generally speaking, participated in the strongest lobbying that Brussels has ever been subjected to.

On the other hand, I have been developing open standards, starting with the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). The cultural contrast between the two organizations was very strong. FFII was a group of insane volunteers, incredibly creative, full of cold, tough determination to stop SAP, Siemens, Microsoft and Nokia (even worse guys) in their desire to change European legislation to legalize the gray market for software patents. The AMQP working group included banks and large software companies, which also turned out to be insane in their own way, and at the same time more unattractive.

Being surrounded by madness on all sides, I suddenly again thought about the importance of researching social instincts and sectarian techniques. With my friends from FFII, we ran company by company. Sites, petitions, e-mails. mail, conference ... there was no end to it. Most of our companies did not reach a decent scale, only some of them. But more importantly, for three years we experimented and collected information.

We understood two important things. First, the cult is the reverse side of the smart crowd. Sectarian patterns seemed sharpened, and I watched as some people applied them to other people over and over. In any close group, family, company, or team, cult traits begin to appear, to a greater or lesser extent. It's all about the degree. However, as soon as you spend your free time on someone else’s project, you essentially begin to slide down this slope. I saw whole groups go off the rails and could no longer think soberly or produce accurate results. There was a clear causal relationship: the more the group became similar to a sect, the more useless it became.

Secondly, simply reversing sectarian techniques is not enough. Yes, it helps to develop personal creativity and strength right from the start, but this is not the same as building a strong community. For this, you need more specific patterns. Define a convincing mission to attract newbies. Make it easier for people to start. Welcome disputes and conflicts, because good ideas are born in them. Systematically delegate authority, create rivalry. Work more with volunteers than hired employees. Achieve diversity and scope. Let people own the work, and not the work - the people.

Of course, it is much cheaper and faster to conduct large-scale experiments with people online than in the real world. To confirm or deny the recipe for building a community, all you need to do is create a space, define some rules of the game, announce it to the world, sit back and wait.

My largest and most successful experiment to date, which I will refer to frequently, is the ZeroMQ software community. It grew out of a team that assembled in one of the attics of Slovakia, into the global community, and it is used by thousands of organizations. In addition, ZeroMQ was completely created and guided by its community: over a hundred root library creators, and over a hundred related projects.

Translation of the book "Social Architecture":



about the author


“Unfortunately, we do not choose death for ourselves, but we can meet her with dignity so that we will be remembered as men.”
- the movie "Gladiator"



Pieter Hintjens - Belgian developer, writer. He held the position of CEO and chief software designer at iMatix , a company that produces free software , such as the ZeroMQ library (the library takes care of some of the data buffering, queuing, connection establishment and recovery, etc.), OpenAMQ, Libero , GSL code generator , and the Xitami web service.


Much detail here: Thirty five years I, as a necromancer, inhaled life in dead iron with the help code

It's time for my last article. I could write more, there is time, but then I will think about other things: how comfortable it is to sit in bed, when to take painkillers, and about people around me.

... I want to write one last model, the last protocol, which is dedicated to how to die, having some knowledge and time in store. This time I will not format the RFC. :)
Death report

Peter Hinchens website
Wikipedia article

about the project


image I, with the support of Filtech-accelerator , plan to publish on Habré (and, perhaps, in paper) the translation of the book “Social Architecture” . IMHO, this is the best (if not the only adequate) manual for managing / building / improving communities focused on product creation (and not on mutual grooming or “worship” to the leader, sports club, etc.).

Thoughts and ideas of Peter Hinchens on Habré:


Call to action


If you have projects / start-ups with a high share of technologies aimed at public benefit in the first place and to receive profit as an auxiliary function (for example, like Wikipedia), write in person or register for an accelerator program .

If you send links to articles, videos, courses on the Coursera on managing / building / improving communities, focused on creating a product , with me chocolate.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/346064/

More articles:


All Articles