1. Sep 14th, 2006

    Rounded Corners – 22

    Do follow. I use Akismet and moderate comments to keep spam away. So there’s no reason to deny you link love. If you leave a comment on this blog, it will link back to your blog, that’s the way the Web works! I just installed Kimmo Suominen’s DoFollow WordPress plugin, and said goodbye to rel=nofollow. Thanks Joost de Valk for the tip.

    Two misses in one. From The Idiocy of Crowds: “Collaboration is the hottest buzzword in business today. Too bad it doesn’t work.” Two things missing. IMO David H. Freedman doesn’t go far enough to explain how bad groupthink really is (can we pass this bold decision by consensus?). On the other hand, the little decisions you make every single day are just as important to your success as the big decision you make in the boardroom. Can you afford to not collaborate? (Via Mathew Ingram)

    Hold this for a second. In case you missed the SF Ruby meetup, Chris put his presentation on memcaching with Ruby online.

    Did you know that … Chris also collected some indispensable tips for irb and the Rails console. Those are great time savers. I have another tip for you: subscribe to his blog.

    HAML. I hate the name, but I love the concept. HAML is a templating system that has two things going for it. It uses whitespace for indentation. You either love it, or hate it, but it helps you work with the structure of the page. And it borrows the CSS syntax for specifying class names and identifiers. How cool is that?

    Printable PDF | Posted by Assaf Filed in general 2 Comments »

    1. Sep 14th, 2006

      Reg Braithwaite

      In “The Wisdom of Crowds,” James Surowiecki does actually discuss the differences betwen situations where crowds perform more poorly than individuals.

      I don’t think he “glossed over” them, as “The Idiocy of Crowds” suggests: in fact, he was very clear on the fact that “achieving consensus” was, in fact, the poorest way to make a decision.

      He said that the crowds makes the best decision when there are lots of independant actors making decisions without feedback about what decisions the other actors are making. This is the exact opposite of achieving consensus in a business context.

    2. Sep 14th, 2006

      Assaf

      Reg,

      Wisdom of Crowds is the new Waterfall. Both get mis-interpreted by well meaning people that don’t have time to even read the cliff notes, and decide to understand the model based on one catch phrase.

      In other words, bloggers like me :-)

      When I said “glossed over”, I was referring to David H. Freedman (article), not James Surowiecki (book). I think David glossed over how bad crowds can be for making consensus decisions.

      Like you said, when they’re not independent agents, crowds perform poorly.

      So I sort of agree with the premise that collaboration software as decision making model has an inherit flaw: consensus.

      But separately, most decisions are not even remotely related to crowds. If you’re a big company, that’s because you need a lot of people working on different tasks. And they all need to make a lot of independent decisions.

      Think of the work you do every day: how many decisions you make as part of a group, and how many decisions you make so other people in the group don’t have to worry about the same thing?

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