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I was in the middle of a run this past weekend with a friend who works for a large tech company. He was commenting on the fact that there are going to be layoffs coming up for his company and that despite all of this the CEO might still be making in the range of 10 million dollars. We did some quick calculations, but figured that the average R&D/ General & Administrative employee probably made in the range of 100-150k. That means that the CEO was making in the range of 100x to 66x more than the average US college educated fairly experienced employee. What could you do with 66-100 employees? You could crowdsource the job of CEO…
It’s still an idea, but you’d have to put some controls around it.
A) The group would have to be sufficiently diverse. This way the CEO crowd would have more overall experience than any one man would have. Being diverse, they’d sidestep some of the groupthink issues as well.
B) It would have to be sufficiently large, but in order to pitch this to boards, you’d have to show some improvement in cost savings. Is 25 enough, 30?
C) There would have to be some thought into how to enable some forms of communication between the CEOs, and how to disable some others. My concern here is that we’d turn the CEO job into a mini-Senate/House with factions and partisanship, which destroys the “independent” nature of the crowd.
D) A couple of those CEOs might have to be in charge of maintaining the communication process, ensuring no funny business is going on. They would assemble the information and pass it up to board, or down to the operating divisions. This would be an overhead cost, but somebody’s got to do it.
I admit that this was dreamt up while in a somewhat oxygen deprived state, but I think going through why this might or might not work would be valuable into understanding what can be done in an informal open communication-based system vs. what could be done in the traditional way of doing things.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/technology/internet/12flu.html
The New York Times has this article detailing the CDC/Google partnership to provide data on searches about the flu. This is particularly interesting to me due to some of the research I did in my Systems Engineering project work in a previous life. The point of the research was to look at what a public health group could do to poll data from hospitals. I looked at the ways hospitals stored data, and the possible ways of creating a standard database system, or translation layer to allow a large city like NYC to be able to know there was an outbreak. This type of system would be better than relying on individual hospitals to signal an outbreak, since it would be able to tell if 20 people went to 20 different hospitals with the same symptoms. However, the sheer cost and effort makes this system pretty difficult to implement. There is some interest from the homeland security side, especially in bioterrorism prevention and containment. There were some interesting thoughts on using a peer-to-peer system (the rage at the time), but I wonder if any of our new Web 2.0 tools would help in this…
What Google has done is go to the other side of the equation… They are not polling the hospitals, because that data is pretty tough to translate, and very difficult to aggregate. Plus, the timeliness of the data varies by the hospital and their practices. In this way, Google is going to the user of their search and looking for key terms. These terms and IP addresses would help them to figure out where (in the general sense) there might be a rising trend. It’s not without its faults however, as it relies on the user to know how to search for flu-like symptoms. “Flu”, or “Flu symptoms” could be easily tracked, but “muscle soreness” or “fever” have ambiguous causes. I think this could be valuable in cases where people know what they have. In cases where it requires a doctor to know, this might not work as well.
Light reading for the interested:
International Society for Disease Surveillance
CDC’s website for Syndromic Surveillance
http://profkane.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/the-parameters-of-wisdom/
I think Professor Kane’s post is thought provoking in two ways:
1. This class has created a conflict between traditional learning styles to which most students have become accustomed and a collaborative learning environment this course promotes.
2. Is popularity equal to quality?
1. I’ve been personally struggling with the style of presentation in the class, and for good reason. It’s different that what we’ve had in the past in virtually every class we’ve taken. Is different better? Is different worse? Well, in this class we rely heavily on the contributions of students in the class. We create the content, Prof. Kane creates the structure, facilitates the conversations and makes the backbone powerpoints. While in some cases it may just be a saying, in this class, we make the class good or bad, it’s up to us. In a class of relative newbies, and a Professor with expertise, we rely heavily on the class to contribute… which is much different than a normal lecture and problem set class. In adoption of this format, we’ve seen some unintended consequences. The Web 2.0 environment tries to be self-policing, but generally that requires experts who have ownership. So this raises the questions, who owns the class? Who feels responsible for the content? Is the class sufficiently large to be a “crowd”? How much can we rely on learners to be experts as well? I don’t have the answers to these questions…but it seems to be food for thought.
2. As Jerry’s post says, we reward students for popular content, which in this case is a proxy for valuable content. Jerry’s stated that the combination of presentation in class and the blog posts/weekly assignments have created an issue that he may correct. However, maybe this shows a point in the web 2.0 environment that we hadn’t really challenged in class. We’ve accepted that in general the crowd can filter the “junk” and figure out the gems.
Is that what we’re doing? Is that what the crowd does in practice?
It really depends on the purpose of the crowd. We’ve got 30-40 MBA students participating in a collaborative class in which most are taking this class primarily because it’s required. We have varying levels of participation, varying levels of commitment to the class, and varying expertise in the field… all good for our crowd experiment (diversity is not quite random…it is an MBA class). This is just hearsay, because I haven’t crunched the numbers, but I would say we as a crowd tend to vote for blog posts based on entertainment value rather than educational value (a post can be both, they are not exclusive).
This isn’t necessarily an anomaly, as entertainment is an important piece of the value of web 2.0. Why? Because we all know what’s entertaining, and in that realm we’re probably pretty homogenous. So in this case, we’re rewarded implicitly for educational posts (Jerry’s mention in class), but explicitly for entertaining posts (bonus points based on vote). Can we achieve both? Sure, but it’s easier to post a youtube video of a singing guy on the virtues of facebook.
Our class should value those posts that are both entertaining (because we don’t want to be bored to death) and educational (we’re paying for the class). My attitude tends to be more towards the educational, but I can see why entertaining stuff should be valued as well.
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” -Mark Twain
Given some of the recent stock performance of Silicon Valley heavyweights this week, GOOG, AAPL, INTC, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is throwing out a jab at the Web 2.0 entreprenuers that the fun may be over, Web 2.0 is dead. I can’t help but think back to Prof. Kane’s slide on the hype cycle. Even in Arrington’s post he concedes that while the boom may be over, the technology is here to stay.
“This is the period that social networking as we think of it today was born, and we’ll never be rid of it in our lifetimes.”
So as mentioned in class, there’s a reason to believe we’ll be seeing the true use of this technology in the future. Does it mean that the valuation of Facebook might be a little high? Yes. Are VCs going to think twice before funding another 20 widget/app developers? Yes. In the current times, it might be safe to bet on startups with tangible products and related revenue. However, there’s reason to believe that the quick growth and development in the Web 2.0 tools will become the fertilizer for the next generation of technology.
TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/an-ignoble-but-much-needed-end-to-web-20/
a rebuttal: http://tinycrunch.com/2008/10/10/why-i-dont-buy-into-the-web-20-death-tinycrunch/
http://jonahbermanmi703.blogspot.com/2008/10/crowdsourcing-at-presidential-debate-no.html
Jonah brought up a great topic for discussion, based on a question (and classic non-answer from a politician) in the debate from a couple nights ago.
“Should we fund a Manhattan-like Project that developed the nuclear bomb to deal with global energy and alternative energy, or should we fund one-hundred thousand garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?”
I think this is a great question for debate in the class, and here’s why:
1. We’ve discussed crowdsourcing, but from the standpoint of a company searching for development innovations (ex. P&G and toothpaste, InnoCentive, etc.) But how are the problems posted to the crowd really done? P&G didn’t ask for the crowd to make toothpaste, they asked for solutions to a specific problem that wouldn’t necessarily limit the crowd to those who’ve spent their lives designing toothpaste.
2. Does renewable energy and green tech lend itself to more of a Manhattan Project, or Silicon Valley? Consider the following characteristics on each side:
Manhattan Project (a series of government funded projects to produce a functional nuclear weapon)
- Many sites, spread around the country
- Top secret development
- Parallel development of resources (plutonium) and engineering
- Top minds in their respective fields in all of the sites
- A race against evil (Axis powers)
- A product that is was never meant to be sold
- Parts of the product were able to be used in other industries (Nuclear Power) but sharing was an afterthought.
Silicon Valley (a collection of economy funded tech startups that work on various technologies)
- Tight grouping of development in an area known for its high powered local universities
- Evolved from WWII era government development in radio and communication industries
- Spurred on by development of a civilan venture capital system (derived from gov’t funding processes of WWII era)
- Known for development of a variety of technologies originating for transistor technology, and has expanded into computers and computer based industries such as software.
- Creates individual products for commercial and personal consumption
- Limited government intervention in technologies pursued.
3. What should the policy be? Out of the two choices of ” Fund one mega project (Manhattan)”, and “Fund 1000 little project (half-crowdsourcing, half-Silicon Valley)” my choice would be None of the Above.
Our current politicians know that a Manhattan style project was the best that we could do in the 1930s and 1940s, and it was able to succeed based on tremendous resources, manpower, and a looming spectre of Nazis. It was good against evil, everyone pitched in. There was no opportunity to sell out, or cut and run. This wasn’t a commercial project, and was guarded so tightly that you probably would have been shot if you tried to leave. The risks involved were worth taking, because if we didn’t succeed, there might not be a tomorrow. The current energy crisis has a tomorrow, it’s just more expensive, and it’s much more difficult to persuade the taxpayers that we need to pay now to protect great grandkids.
The current holders of the government purse strings also know that they could not reproduce Silicon Valley in a bubble. Any time you limit innovation to a government specified spec, you’ll either get nothing or exactly your spec. In fact, we should be asking ourselves, why hasn’t Silicon Valley solved energy before this? They’ve tried, and it hasn’t caught on commercially. If the government selects 1000 companies/projects, there’s going to be tremendous oversight, planning, specifications, etc (Just ask anyone working at Lockheed or Northrup Grumman). That’s great for those of us in the systems engineering business, but really locks down on innovation. This just screams “Top-down” planning that crowdsourcing circumvents.
So how does the government tweak the commerical rewards system to tip the balance of rewards and profits so that energy tech will work? Tax cuts for green tech, subsidies, tariffs, taxes on fossil fuels. That would create incentives for innovative folks in Silicon Valley to work on the problem. Some government funding might work in some labs/academic situations, but this pales in comparison to the amount of capital available if it is a global economic success (How many profs do you see driving Bentleys and owning their own Learjets?). Small amounts of funding for Innovation prizes might also work, but the main goal is to give economic reasons why we should use renewable over oil.
Extra resources: The wikinomics website w/ blog posts…
http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/
And a post about how a croudsourced venture could go wrong:
The stage is set for a battle of wireless standards as seen by the excellent posts by my classmates Sunny and Chris. As we move towards greater mobility and smaller gadgets great display capabilities, there’s a battle of how we get the information on our cellphones, smart phones, iPod Touches, iPhones, Google G1, PDAs, and Wireless Laptops. Two of the contenders come in the form of WiMAX, a distant relative of WiFi standards today, and 3G wireless, from the technology we use in cellphones now.
WiMAX (from Sunny McSherry)
http://sunnysforecast.blogspot.com/2008/09/wimax-goes-to-baltimore.html
3G Wireless (from Chris)
http://bmw1blog.blogspot.com/2008/09/mobile-broadband-and-our-pdas.html
How can we compare these standards?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wimax.svg
The success of these competing standards relies on 2 main contention points, Mobility vs. Speed and Adoption/Infrastructure.
The first (as illustrated above) is the tradeoff between speed of the communication and the mobility of the user. As an example, if I know exactly where I need an internet connection, I can run a wire to the exact location and have all the bandwidth I am willing to pay for (just adding more wires, or different technologies like fiber). This is very high speed, with low mobility, since I can’t stretch the wire too much. If you wish to have a little more mobility at the location, perhaps an office with moving workers, you can install a WiFi access point. However, the range is limited, and there is a decline in speed, down from standard 100 Mbit/s for wired down to a max of 54 Mbit/s in wireless. Efforts are being made to improve the wired and wireless speeds to double their current capacities, widening the gap between it and mobile phone data transmission standards. 3G wireless is stated to be able to hit 2 Mbit/s but experience slower speeds when the user is moving (like in a car). Closeness to relay points also increases speed.
However, Speed and Mobility is not the only concern. The installed infrastructure and user base clearly aid 3G and it’s future versions in winning the battle of high speed mobile data communication. Both sides have major players supporting them, WiMAX: Intel, Samsung, and Sprint… 3G (and higher): Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, and Qualcomm (Source: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=556). While there’s only been a few deployments of WiMAX (Baltimore recently, a few areas in Asia, especially Taiwan, who has had $500 million pledged by Intel in support of a roll out there). It’s still questionable though how much it is going to take to make it successful in the US. Supporters have lined up in the last year to throw their money into the battle totalling over $3 billion for Xohm + Clearwire to provide WiMAX in the US., (http://gigaom.com/2008/05/06/clearwire-wimax-32-billion/, and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121010437224271501.html)
As I was thinking of what to post in my class blog, I realized that working in a technology related field both aided and constrained the topics I am able to talk about. Being a proud engineering type, I’d love to tell you all of the cool things that people I know are working on, but then realized that might not be the best thing for the future at my company and within an industry. Don’t want to give away the trade secrets…
So what do companies take into account when starting informative blogs, and what should employees do to protect themselves from future pain? From the standpoint of the company, a company blog can be an asset and a liability. Here’s a list of rules for the Siemens company blog.
http://www.ravenwoodcreative.com/blog1/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/siemens_blogging_guidelines.pdf
Companies have outbound marketing professionals to manage the corporate image, and while a blog illuminates the inside view, they don’t want the company to be totally transparent. In addition, how should you act as a blogger, trying to contribute to the knowledge of your peers with opinions and links, without shooting yourself in the foot. Keep in mind who may be reading your page, who might read in the future, and that an enemy today might be an ally (or boss) in the future. Logic should prevail over emotion.
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