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03/01/2008: "Large groups need strong leadership, internet simulation proves"

For most of [its] 13 years, Ebay has been run largely as a self-policed island, a place where order was preserved less by real world laws than by norms and customs and expectations and reputations that were almost entirely virtual. Ebayers governed themselves by rating each transaction using the site's "feedback" system, where they could report crooks, not to the state but to each other. The theory was that, as in a medieval souk in which everyone knew everyone, everyone on Ebay would know who the crooks were by reading their feedback. Now the company has basically admitted that the cybersouk model does not work: buyers did not tell the truth about sellers, and sellers did not tell the truth about buyers. And in a market where traders lie, the trust that is so central to online commerce cannot flourish.

This isn't unusual. It follows a common pattern that we've seen play out in other "social production" sites like Digg and Wikipedia. (Disclosure: I'm on the editorial advisory board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.) As these sites grow, keeping them in line requires more rules and regulations, greater exercise of central control. The digital world, it seems, is not so different from the real world.

In a new post about how "bottom-up" communities need "top-down" controls to work successfully, Kevin Kelly notes that "the supposed paragon of adhocracy - the Wikipedia itself - is itself far from strictly bottom-up. In fact a close inspection of Wikipedia's process reveals that it has an elite at its center (and that it does have an elite center is news to most). Turns out there is far more deliberate top-down design management going on than first appears."

[ If you don't lead, no one leads, and he's an aimless, wasteful, pollution-intensive, directionless leader. You cannot fight the need for power. All you can do is make sure the power has good values. ]

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php