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Name:
EMEA Keynote Dr_ Dariusz Jemielniak-NISO Plus
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EMEA Keynote Dr_ Dariusz Jemielniak-NISO Plus
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Segment:0 .
TODD CARPENTER: So I'm so pleased to welcome you to the second of the keynotes of NISO Plus. And to introduce our speaker today, I'm going to introduce to the stage Rich Kobel. He is vice president at Straive, one of the significant sponsors of NISO Plus this year. So Rich, over to you.
RICH KOBEL: Thank you, Todd. I just want to say that we're very happy to be sponsoring NISO Plus 2022. And it's a great pleasure to introduce Dr Dariusz Jemielniak as the closing keynote speaker. for those of you in Europe, Middle East, and Africa Dr. Jemielniak is Professor of management and head of MINDS, that's Management in Network and Digital Societies at Kozminski University in Poland. Dr. Jemielniak's work focuses on social data science and collaborative society, open collaboration projects such as Wikipedia, FLOSS, strategies of knowledge, intensive organizations, and virtual communities.
RICH KOBEL: In 2015, he was elected to the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. In 2019, he was elected to the Polish Academy of Sciences as the youngest member in social sciences and humanities in its history. He is also currently a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Dr. Jemielniak's talk is entitled, Collaborative Society Needs Institutional Support.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Many thanks. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. It's awesome. It's a great honor, great opportunity. And indeed, I want to talk about a collaborative society and why it needs some support. And to start, I just want to say that I'm basing on my work from Collaborative Society co-authored with Aleksandra Przegalinska, a little bit with Common Knowledge, An Ethnography of Wikipedia.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And my research is basically using this big data approach, which is combining data science with ethnography. Now one thing I wanted to show you to start off the conversation is the interest over time according to Google Trends, comparing information society with sharing economy. And as you can see in October 2014, already, sharing economy was more popular on the internet than information society, which for years, was the buzzword of the day.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Now everybody's talking about sharing economy, everybody and their dog. Every single corporation is trying to get on this train. And indeed, it has a great premise. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers research, the sharing economy is going to be definitely the next big thing. 2013, it was just 5% of the economy. They're projecting in 2025, it might be half, half.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We already know-- this research is about a year and a half old. We already know it's not going to happen to that extent. But it's still going to be definitely big. And what I want to say, and probably, this particular point is not going to be very surprising to you, given the fact that you're in information studies, in the field yourself, is that we shouldn't be even talking about sharing economy in this sense because it's neither sharing nor economy, especially in this popular discourse.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And people are talking about sharing economy. And they mean, Uber, maybe, Airbnb, and the likes. And I think the problem with this particular misdemeanor is that it's not really referring to the sharing as we understand it in the society. The notion of sharing economy is actually very popular in this, for sure. But it often denotes just like capitalism. And Uber and Airbnb, if you think about it, they are basically extensions of lending apartments, of using cars to transport people.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So the premise of accommodating underutilized goods is most of the time very overrated. True. Uber, Airbnb, and many other platforms do offer an added value. But this added value is not really about sharing the underutilized goods. When you look at the big picture, the percentages, it's basically business as usual.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: People who are driving Uber, they try to make a living. People are buying apartments to rent out on Airbnb is basically a new modality of conducting business in these particular industries Moreover, when you think about it, this juxtaposition, this sharing being opposed to selling in the normal understanding, shows very clearly that Uber and the likes undermine the pre-existing culture of sharing.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Remember when was the last time you asked somebody to give you a ride to the airport? The reason you didn't is exactly that it's easier to take an Uber. So it's actually the unsharing economy, undercutting the sharing principles, the sharing traditions that we all had. Sharing a ride, riding somebody to the airport used to be a very important symbolic ritual of showing somebody you care, of showing somebody that you are their friends or close family member.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Now it's basically off the table, just like with the water. And probably you know that in the 19th century, water became a commodity. Then it gradually became something we put a value on. And nowadays in some countries, it's even difficult to get free water. If you go to a restaurant in Europe, getting a bottle of free water is definitely something you-- it would be a luxury to get.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: In the US, it's a little more popular. But nevertheless, water became commodified. Here, we are commodifying rides, we are commodifying giving somebody a couch. If you think about it, of course, if you had a roommate, they had a hairdryer, and you told them, hey, could I use it. And he said sure, it'll be $5. Very clearly, it's the opposite of sharing. It's just the opposite of that.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So here we understand it, the sharing principle the sharing part of this term is definitely a little off its semantic value. And finally, sharing is very important here. Of course, in all those new platforms, sharing could be an important component. But it's the interactions that make the tech change that we're experiencing the most profound. It's not about the economy either.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: If you look at a big picture, if you focus on the economic aspects of that, you're missing the non-monetary aspects of the change. For instance, cooperation for fun, the rituals that the communities create, the reinforcements they are making. And of course, I'm not going to say that the economy is unimportant. The only thing I'm trying to say is that different ways of running industries and businesses, they will change all the time.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But what we are experiencing and possibly missing when there isn't sharing economy as the key term is the much deeper change, the change that is very, very deeply human. There is very solid research showing-- neuroscience is showing that being collaborative is actually more distinctive to humans than opposable thumbs. There are studies showing that little humans, three months old, are geared towards collaboration much more than chimpanzees at this stage of development.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So possibly, we are actually wired to be collaborative. The question, of course, is if we were to collaborate, why don't we see it all around? And I would say we actually do. If somebody stops you in the street and asks you for directions, the first instinct will be to stop and help them rather than optimize the benefit, time benefit gradient, and basically keep moving.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We are geared towards collaboration for a reason. This makes us as species survive. This is how we have been able to survive in much worse circumstances hundreds of thousands of years ago. And this wiring stays on. However, capitalism as a game, a system, makes it a little more difficult. It makes collaboration a little less natural.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Just like with water, when in the 19th century you stopped, you ask somebody if you could use their water from the well, it was a ritual that allowed you to do that. There was a common understanding you're supposed to be allowed to ask for water. Once it gets a price tag, once there is a commodification of this, then the problem arises. And obviously, it's giving stuff away for free.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: By the way, fresh air is still free on this planet. Maybe it will not be so free in a couple of years to come. So the question remains, what is the change? Is the change to commodify, or is there some opposing change happening as a result of platforms? And I would say that the revolution we are observing and that we are sometimes missing when we're talking about a sharing economy is the emerging technologies that make direct collaboration possible.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: They have the collaboration enabling features. And they allow to engage much bigger, broader populations. They act as super multipliers for many effects of collaboration that would be otherwise much less noticeable. And well, I'm thinking about a bigger roadmap for a collaborative society. And I think it's a better term that covers a little more than just focusing on sharing economy. This term shouldn't be used any more.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We can look at the platforms through two different lenses. First of all, the platforms that are made to make profit and that are basically made to foster collaboration. And then we can have users who are oriented at profit and users who are oriented at, basically, something else. In the first bracket, when everybody's trying to maximize profits, sure, we'll have Uber and TaskRabbit Turo.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: It is the classic button capitalism. The gig economy, all those things will probably fall in this bracket. But then we will have users who are profit-oriented and platforms that are cooperatives. This is a little unusual because, typically, when humans are making platforms, will try to make it even more. But we do have time banks, we have food co-ops, peer-to-peer lending systems.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Then we have non-profit oriented users and profit-oriented platforms like Tripadvisor, Yelp, CrowdSurfing, 9GAG, the whole quantified self-movement. And this would be collaborative economy. And this is fine. It's oriented at creating value for the company, but people are spontaneously contributing just to make something good for everybody else. And finally, there's the peer production phenomenon, non-profit oriented users, cooperativist platforms.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And this will be Wikipedia, Alliance, OpenStreetMap, but also citizen science movement, online activism, even MeToo, #MeToo, Occupy Wall Street biohacking, very often not really oriented profit, using platforms that are not really making profit neither. So when I talk about a collaborative society, I'm trying to refer to the phenomenon which is definitely on the growing curve.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And it refers to emergent and enduring cooperative groups whose members have developed particular patterns of relationships through technology-mediated cooperation. So basically, online platforms that foster collaboration. And we see it everywhere. It does include Uber. But Uber is probably not the best example of fostering collaboration.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: It's just marginal from this lens. So what I want to talk to you today and I hope we'll have a discussion, a conversation, is when can collaborative society work and when it can't. So what are the boundary conditions for the collaborative society to actually be able to make the best out of it?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: First of all, I think one of the most important factors for collaborative society platforms to work is that when tasks can be easily compartmentalized into small tidbits that anybody can swallow. Think about it. When you're submitting a review on Google Maps, when you're doing this, there's not much work that is needed. Actually, the base, the minimum, is you just click the number of stars you would give a given establishment.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: What you can add is a couple of sentences of description, you can add pictures, write a very long review. But the bottom line is that it's just one click. The same applies to open-source movement. If you think about the reasons why does it even work, we understand that open source-- and I'm thinking Ubuntu or actually, all these variations but also just regular open-source software that is developed by a large group of people, not just one-man, one-person shows-- is that it is possible to contribute mainly because it's relatively easy to contribute a small part that people can take or leave.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But it is good enough so somebody might come, join, contribute, and leave forever, and it still could be useful for somebody else. This is a phenomenon. GitHub, by the way, I know all GitHub repositories, this is phenomenally showing that this modality of sharing and contributing is a new form of creating new things, new form of collaboration, a new form of producing something valuable for society.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Second, while it's super important, and it's not enough to just compartmentalize work into tiny little tidbits. It's super important also to be able to reduce governance overhead to ad hoc structures. This is very important because if you can reduce governance to structures, you don't have to have leadership that is constantly putting hours into management.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And with spontaneous, collaborative society projects, it's essential there is not somebody who's trying to run it all around. If you are thinking, for example, why doesn't Facebook moderation work well, one of the answers could be it does not try to use the collaborative society approach with dispersed structures, very little management, spontaneous, small compartmentalization run by the community itself.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Third, it's very important that people can easily join and quit without any consequences or long-term commitments because then, people are going to have a big threshold of joining. If you look at Wikipedia, for example, which I will be discussing in a bit, with Wikipedia, the smallest contribution could be just correcting one comma. You don't even need to create a login, to log in on Wikipedia. So you just click Edit, correct comma, go on, maybe not come back ever.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But it's still, you made it a little better. You made the world a little better by correcting this comma mistake if it's easy done. So you join, quit whenever you want. But it also means that governance is much more difficult. Because typically in organizing, one of the biggest tasks that you need to handle, one of the biggest challenges, is that you need to be able to know who does what and when.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We do not get this in a collaborative society platforms. The people come and go. And we do not really have a good way of addressing them. So it has to be organized in such a way that it's possible. Fourth, it's super important for collaborative societies systems to work that the personal trust can be replaced with trust and procedures. And what do I mean by that?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: If you need to trust somebody, some other human, on the other side of the world who has entirely different concepts of culture, of what is right, what is not right, you do not know them personally, it's super difficult. That's why collaborative society platforms very often rely on procedures, technologies, algorithms to streamline this trust, to replace the need for trust onto the procedure.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: For instance, on Wikipedia, if you want to-- if you want to check if the article is good, you don't need to trust whoever wrote it. But with the traditional encyclopedia, you would probably check the reference, you would check who wrote it. On Wikipedia, of course, you can check who wrote this. But this will be very often IP addresses or nicknames that will not tell you anything.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So what is more important is that you need to trust the process. And people who create Wikipedia will need to trust the process. They will need to know that whatever is added and whatever is not added to Wikipedia has followed a very specific guideline, and that everybody else was trying to make sure that this guideline was followed. And finally, one of the boundary conditions for collaborative society to thrive is that commitment needs to be voluntary, non-monetary.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Quite honestly, this one is debatable. And of course, we can discuss it in the discussion part. But I think it's very essential that people contribute as a gift rather than as a transaction. This is why Google's attempt at creating an encyclopedia, [INAUDIBLE] if I'm not mistaken, didn't really work out. They were trying to make an encyclopedia the same way that YouTube works.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But it didn't work because people were more willing to contribute to Wikipedia than to create something with tiny, little royalties from whatever they wrote, especially since collaborative editing, which is the essence of Wikipedia and the essence of [INAUDIBLE] then, was not really giving them that much kudos as shooting a video would. So they didn't have the personal exposure.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And instead, they could enter a transaction. A transaction is not as attractive as being able to do something that's spontaneously put aside. Now about Wikipedia, and I started to talk about it a little bit, what is it? I mean, I'm sure you've heard it's the fifth most popular website in the world. So it's very difficult not to use Wikipedia. Anybody who says they don't use Wikipedia are most likely liars.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But to me, it's not really an encyclopedia, per se. It's the largest social movement on this planet, 43 million named accounts, tens of thousands of people editing every month. And it's probably-- it's something you've heard, in 2005, it's already been proven to be better than Britannica by a study in Nature. The study was definitely debated later.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But since then, Wikipedia has grown 50 times or 50 times bigger. And well, Britannica is, sad to know, basically out of business. So I think the people have voted. And we've had an enormous number of studies showing that Wikipedia is actually very accurate, much more accurate, or at least as accurate as the professional sources.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And nobody really knows why. I'm confessing this to you. I've been studying this for over a decade. We don't really know why it works. Wikipedia doesn't work in theory. It can only work in practice. But somehow, the results speak for themselves. Six million articles on Wikipedia, already, six million.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Year after year, people think, oh, yeah, it's done. We've covered everything. And no, we haven't. There's more articles coming-- over 53 million pages in total outside of content pages, though. Think about it. Almost 10 times more pages. What could be those pages? Some of them, of course, would be categories.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: If you have George W. Bush, there will be category, presidents of United States. Some of this will be thought pages, discussing what should be covered in the article. But the vast majority of this 53 million pages is discussions, the community life, regulations, considerations, debates, how to do this, how to do that. So you see, immediately, there is 10 times more content that is not encyclopedia itself.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There's a budding social life that is self-organizing to create this phenomenal website. And there will be loads of lengthy discussions. There will be-- the major topics will go into hundreds of thousands of words each, which tells us something interesting about the collaborative society, people like And Ostrom, a Nobel Prize winner, once wrote that to make a successful community, you need to give them agency to create rules.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: You need to let them decide how it's going to be organized. It will be another good reason why Facebook moderation by the community is not so effective. Because it's basically done by hired guns. Now about Wikipedia, if you look at this graph, one thing is very striking. I told you that it's super important people can come and go anytime they want, right? And it's true that people come and go on Wikipedia too.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We do have a variation in the number of people editing. But if you look at the time between every 10 millionth edit on the English Wikipedia, you see it's amazingly stable. Nearly flat in the very beginning, there was a huge drop. But then for years and years and years, it stays pretty much flat, which means, and think about this for a while, that in months when we have more editors, they added less.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: In months when we have less editors, everybody somehow magically contributes more, which is, I think, amazing. I don't really have a good explanation for it. But I would say that this is a self-regulation in a community that apparently takes this form. And by the way, Wikipedia, has lots of rules. This is probably because people want to create rules to feel they own it.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But it's already getting to the level of insanity. There are over 1,000 regulatory documents, even just 50 policies total to 150,000 words. So it's definitely a weird phenomenon, especially for spontaneous, open, self-regulated community. All decisions are participatory. Anyone can propose changes, demand answers. And decisions are based on consensus rather than plain voting.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: One thing that might surprise you if you have not looked into Wikipedia is that Wikipedia doesn't care about truth. And if I say this, people think, what Wikipedia Foundation Trust, it says that Wikipedia doesn't care about truth. Well, yeah, it doesn't. It only cares about verifiability and sources. And if you think about it, that makes perfect sense. If we cared about the truth, we would have to determine what the truth is.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There are so many, in science even, very often, there will be contradicting paradigms, contradicting theories. And we do not want to do that. We do not want to decide what the truth is. What we want to do, though, is create a process, as I told you, create a process create a structure, create a system that will allow, for any theory that is properly covered in academic journals to be reflected.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So it's about us being able to verify the content that was [INAUDIBLE] and us about using the proper sources. And they have to be, of course, proportional to the topic. If we're talking about. Hip-hop, it doesn't have to be necessarily an academic journal. There is the proportionality of the sources. But again, the essence stays that it's not about truth, it's about the sources.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And finally, there's this very interesting rule that, I think, shows how collaborative society, communities, actually can thrive that ignore rule, all rules. It's one of the rules of Wikipedia, when the good of Wikipedia demands that you shouldn't ignore other rules when it's very clear that you should do something else. Now Wikipedia is really, really weird.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And when I say weird, I mean, it's not that everybody loves everybody. People are actually entering huge debates, people are entering conflicts, the so-called edit wars. Even such topics as whether the name should be Ivory Coast or Cote d'Ivoire, Keev or Kiev, what should be the spelling of the name, will take hundreds of thousands of words of discussions. Ganges or Ganga.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: By the way, this one is very painful. Because if you live in India, if you hear the name of this river Ganges, you would think, well, it's colonial. It's not really OK to use it. Why are we using this? And especially if you think about the fact that in India, people are native English speaker, just coming from India, I would say there is a very strong argument why it should be called Ganga.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But for now, it's still Ganges I think it's probably because of the dominance of the verifiable sources from the American English publications. But nevertheless, even things like yogurt or yoghurt spelling American versus British spelling will take hours of discussions. To make things even weirder, there was a huge discussion whether Mexico has an official language. And guess what? Three months of discussions, we still don't know.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We do not have-- we couldn't nail it down to a specific document that would state, this is Spanish. Spanish is the official language. We do not have the document. We do not have a verifiable source to claim that. So things like this will take time for community members. Some people would say it's a waste of time. I don't necessarily think so.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: I think it creates culture, helps create a feeling of ownership, and it cements people collaborating around some ideas. So even people will edit for 1/10 of this time they are spending time discussing what should be edited, it's probably still time well spent. Oh, sorry. What I wanted to get to was that we know when the collaborative society can work.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But the question is when-- what are the boundary conditions that make it not work? And the example I wanted to use and I wanted to discuss with you was what was happening during the COVID pandemic. Because I think, especially, this example shows us very well what the potential is, but also what are the limitations of the collaborative society. And if you recall in the very beginning of the pandemic, there was this moment, and we all were scared.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We all were trying to find ways how to behave. And there were a couple of initiatives in the very beginning. People were spontaneously trying to do stuff. If you recall, there were initiatives to produce-- 3D printers to produce face shields. There were initiatives to produce home-made masks. There was a very interesting, super cool initiative on Kaggle Data Science Initiative that was aimed at studying, analyzing data to address the pandemic.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There was quite a number of initiatives, not really, really technology, but using technology to organize themselves. For example, to deliver food to people, to try to help out your neighbors, all this was based on platform, spontaneous typical collaborative society approach. All this worked. However, if we look at it one very specific problem, it didn't really work.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And I want to discuss it a little bit more with you. As you probably remember in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a shortage of ventilators worldwide. Ventilators, as you know, were devices that could decide about a life or death. And we didn't have enough. And the reason why we didn't have enough, even in the United States, was that nobody cared enough about this.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: In 2007, there was this initiative by the American government. We started Aura Project. And Aura Project was basically aimed at trying to produce very cheap ventilators for the public use. But unfortunately, the company that was tasked with it, received the grant, was taken over by a large corporation. And they tried to restart the project. In 2014, if I'm not mistaken, Phillips committed to develop this.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: A couple of years passed, they still didn't. And they didn't deliver the ventilators for the price tag that was set at roughly $3,000, if I recall correctly. But when the pandemic broke, quite a number of initiatives worldwide started to produce ventilators with the use of 3D printers, and of course, combining engines and a couple of other mechanisms. And they were quite successful at organizing engineers around this idea.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There was this ventilator project in Poland. Their premise was to produce a ventilator for roughly $100. Very cheap. Sure. Probably not super effective, true. But if their choice was to have this or nothing, suffocating without a chance is probably not a choice any of us would have made. And in Colombia, there was a very similar initiative trying to produce ventilators.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: In fact, when I was trying to track down the number of initiatives like this, there was at least a dozen worldwide that, at the same time, were trying to organize people, engineers, medical doctors around this particular idea. There was an MIT project doing exactly this. There was a University of Florida open data, open blueprints for ventilators project.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And all these initiatives were happening simultaneously, which I think, shows us that one of the problems with the collaborative society is the lack of coordination. We need coordination for these projects to happen. If we have 20 projects, actually worse than if we had one, who is going to choose which one is good? Probably, we're going to choose to go with a brand. So there is an MIT project and 20 others, we are probably going to go with the MIT.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But is it the best approach? I'm not so sure. There is no procedure, though. We do not really have a system of choosing the right blueprint. Moreover, if you look at this particular case, you see that collaborative society is good at organizing people around ideas. But it's not really so good at making sure that something is certified.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Sure, you can produce a device that might save your life. But good luck with finding a doctor that is going to use a device that if not certified. It's not going to happen. If it's not FDA-approved, it's not going to be used. You can use it on yourself, but it's probably not going to happen either because when you need a ventilator, you're not going to be able to apply it yourself. So the problem of regulation and certification, very clearly, for making sure that whoever is using the device is not held responsible.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Yeah. There's a problem of distribution. Sure, you can-- let's assume we produced, created, blueprints of working ventilators. Let's assume 3D printing enthusiasts like Jason could print it at home, maybe buy a little bit of parts here and there, 3D print some, do something else, produce a ventilator. But what next?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: If it gets certified even, are they supposed to deliver it? Are they supposed to distribute it? There's no good system of deciding how to distribute it and how to load balance, the number of ventilators when they are actually needed and where they should go. Because nobody expects people to be collaborative producing stuff. There are legal issues. Ventilate, the Polish startup that was-- they started the Polish movement that was trying to produce the ventilator that cost very affordably and make it open source, one of the problems they encountered was that they received information that if they are going to publish those blueprints, there could be legal ramifications.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And none of these enthusiasts wants to risk with their lifetime savings to-- just because of the idea, right? Nobody wants to take the legal responsibility or legal risk of possibly infringing somebody's patents and whatnot. Later, by the way, they found out it's totally OK. They were not infringing upon anybody's patents. But then they had to make this tough choice whether to publish it or not.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And since none of them were lawyers-- they were engineers, doctors-- it was very difficult for them to go through with this. So these things are very clearly missing from the ecosystem. And when you think about this, we see immediately that the collaborative society can address very specific problems. But most likely when these problems will not occur. So when there is no legal ramifications, when there's no logistics, when there's no certification needed.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: For instance, cluster headaches, a very disastrous problem that the corporations don't really want to tackle all that much, there is not that much money in it, there's a huge open-source community of people for monitoring their bodies. They're using medical devices like this to counter cluster headaches, to find patterns. But this is something that is not very regulated. This is something they can do.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: This is relatively safe and does not require dealing with the three problems that I mentioned. If you're talking about birds recognition in Ornithology, there's a very nice budding collaborative society community of people who are trying to make sure they recognize all birds in the world. And they discovered quite a couple of new species that ornithologists didn't know about, and also to monitor the size of the population of those species.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Super nice, super well-organized. All this works. Wikipedia works. Linux works. But once we get to the point when there is a need for certification, there is the need for some legal responsibility, there is some need for logistical problems, optimization, now we have a lot of hurdles.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So my claim-- and I apologize for I absolutely no idea why my slides just disappeared. The point I was going to make and I want to make is that what we need as a society is to realize is that the modes and modalities of collaboration have changed over the last 20 years significantly. And the law, they're still behind. Just like with copyright, think about copyright.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Copyright has been pretty much stable over the last 70 years. And the practice of using media has changed dramatically. The practice of sharing media with friends and with strangers changed dramatically. The law is very clearly behind. The ecosystem is behind. I think the same applies to the collaborative society. We're observing a situation in which people not only can organize around very complex ideas, they can produce very complex devices, and they can deliver amazing results.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But in many areas, they will not be able to mostly because of the anachronistic approach to law, anachronistic approach to certification. Who is supposed to even apply for certification if it's communal movement? Who is going to pay for all the fees that are needed? Who's going to pay for the lawyers? So I would say that the society lags behind. We don't have the institutions.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And we need to create those institutions because there's an enormous potential in the collaborative society. There's an enormous potential to solve many problems that needs solving that corporations have not be able to solve for a long time. And it's fine, right, because the corporations are not the only answer. We have NGOs, we have public financing governments.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Corporations can be replaced, but we also have a collaborative society organizing people around ideas and helping them out to produce the amazing results. So what I would like to see and what I think we should be thinking over the future, is how to make this happen in different industries, different sectors that people are able to organize themselves to produce great results, but also that the burden of certification, legal support, the problem of logistics is taken from them.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And if we look a little more closely at examples of where it works, we'll see that even with Wikipedia, which is a relatively easy thing, nobody's going to sue you for a mistake on Wikipedia. It's a collaboratively edited Wikipedia, encyclopedia. So even there, there has to be Wikimedia Foundation. There has to be an institution that is taking the burden off the volunteers. Linux Foundation, similar thing.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We'll have somebody who takes away the burden. The question remains, does it have to be so specific? Does it have to be Wikimedia Foundation? Does it have to be Wikimedia Projects? Does it have to be Linux Foundation for Linux? Or maybe we could think of institutional support for initiatives like this because there are many more. And the problem with distribution of funds is such that the giants will get most of the money.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: The known brands will get most of the money, and small initiatives, not so much. So we need to think about ways in which the collaborative society initiatives can receive proper support in the areas that they will never be really good at, the certification, auditing, legal support, and create institutions that will do exactly this. I see in the comments that, would it be true to say the legal system is half-owned by the corporations and that it's just like company?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Well, finance maybe. Definitely, a good argument to make that in the huge discussion about what is fair, what is not fair, only one side has the resources to lobby in their favor. So the discussions about ACTA2 copyright shows very clearly that the needs of the society are not necessarily very well represented when there is a big fight between corporations.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: New media, old media, but still corporations. Nevertheless, what I would argue is that collaborative society does not necessarily need to try to replace the existing industries and business models. On the contrary, I think there's a very fine niche to do this. I told you about those cluster headaches. If there's not enough money in it for the corporations to even bother, why can't we try to make people who experience cluster headaches lives easier just by making self-organization slightly more affordable and easier to make?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And by the way, there was solid research showing that smart watches, data from smart watches, could predict COVID-19 onset. The question to you is, we have this research that was done on a large sample, doctors, medical personnel, and we know it works, why none of the big players Apple, Samsung, why didn't they introduced this as an opt in possibility?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We know a lot of data about our body. Why didn't they offer this? The answer is obvious. There's no money in it. It's a little bit risky when you want to tell your customer they might be getting sick. There's basically no added benefit. But if people were able to self-organize, create an app that would be giving this exact same information, basically, the same kind of data, this would obviously be socially beneficial.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: I could, of course, go on. But I see that we only have 14 minutes left. So I want to leave a little bit of more time for discussion and exchange of ideas, questions possibly. So if there's anything you would like to raise, please, please shoot.
TODD CARPENTER: Dariusz, thank you so much. It's such a brilliant talk and such interesting ideas coming out of this. We want to encourage participants, if you have any questions or comments, drop them in the Q&A box. One of the things that I found interesting, and maybe this is just my own personal valence in the world, is the way in which you were describing a community organization, the teams of volunteers, which try to solve problems focusing on a lightweight infrastructure and established rules, sounds a lot like a standards organization.
TODD CARPENTER: And we're solving problems for which there is no-- there might not be a market solution where people are going to make lots of money with discovery solutions or metadata formats in order to collectively solve problems. I don't know if you were thinking of standards organizations as you were preparing your talk.
TODD CARPENTER: But I really appreciated it.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Well, I think it's a brilliant comment. I think one of the things that are missing is basically, oftentimes, support for creation of standards, protocols. And people in the collaborative society, they are not able to do it themselves, right? They cannot do this. They do a lot of heavy lifting, amazing things. But they will never be able to do this because it's not even their deal, not even if they wanted to.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So creating something, I think, it's exactly spot on, this is what all those initiatives need. Even Wikipedia, even [INAUDIBLE],, even though there are a lot of hundreds of millions of dollars per year budgets, even they could use a little bit of support, in streamlining support. Because Wikipedia, even reaching out with the message that Wikipedia is just as accurate, it's difficult. Reaching out to libraries, universities, and whatnot.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Sure, WHO partnering with Wikipedia to refer to COVID-19 information to Wikipedia, sure, it's a big strong statement showing that it's accurate. But it's difficult to send this message across. So I definitely agree with you that creating standards for all those citizen science, but also, collaborative platforms would make a huge difference.
TODD CARPENTER: I see that Jason wants to jump in with a question.
JASON GRIFFEY: Yeah, if you don't mind. I actually had a question for Dariusz. So I was really intrigued by the slide about laying out when does cooperative miswork. And I was-- it triggered a thought about how one of the pushes, especially in the US, it may be less elsewhere, but especially in the US, one of the pushes of capitalism is for people to look around at collaborative or communal systems and then figure out a way to privatize them in order to extract-- in order to extract economic goods from them.
JASON GRIFFEY: That's a really common theme here in the US right now with our educational system, with library systems, for there to be these attempted privatization efforts, of what is ostensibly a communal or collaborative resource. How do you see-- what do you see as the ability to push back against that impulse?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Well, I think it's a very real risk. And obviously, in my view, a strong community organized around certain Commons is often able to push back. But there has to be a certain critical mass. So as long as people are self-organized around this, sure, there will be protocols, there will be also enough resources to push back. But very often not so in the local communities or in the areas where there is not enough interest for people to self-organize around this.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And we see it over and over, externalization, of course, and appropriation of value, definitely. But I would say it's not very specific to collaborative society only. It happens in many industries and has been basically kept modality of capitalism operating even prior to technology. So I would say the problem is real, but it does not pertain just to the revolution we're experiencing.
JASON GRIFFEY: Cool. Thank you.
TODD CARPENTER: There's a question here, another comment in the chat asking about standards organizations. Another takeaway from your talk is a huge opportunity for standards of organizations to evolve further to support broader collaborative society that may need help in their specific area of expertise or domain.
TODD CARPENTER: So what are those opportunities, and how can, not just SDOs, standards organizations, but also these nonprofit organizations, generally, support this collaborative work?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: I would say that there is a number of things that those communities really need. And some of them are technological, and some of them are actually procedural, just standard based. Even the protocols for conflict resolution, they are nuanced, difficult. And it's difficult to nail it down to what actually works. We know from Wikipedia, comparing it to YouTube, or comparing it to Facebook, that different approaches to conflict resolution, arbitration, mediation produce very radically different results.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And communities, especially small communities, do not really have the capacity to develop them for themselves. So the ability to take standard modules of what should be done in terms of protocol or conflict resolution or what are the good stages of developing a process of how should the things be done, how should a discussion be run, even small things like when you have a discussion, a group of people who want to share an idea, how to make this happen procedurally, so that it's not just a discussion of friends with wine, but it's rather following a specific standard oriented at finding specific solutions.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There are methodologies for this even in coaching and business. But people are not necessarily sharing it outside of this particular industry so it could be used in engineering, for example. So I would say even procedures would be super interesting. But technologically, platform wise, there's a plethora of things that could be done. I'm thinking, for example, about a startup Kialo, which is aimed at trying to find a way to run a civilized discussion and take sentences into arguments, so basically, disassemble a statement into arguments.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And I think it's phenomenal because it's teaching people that you can run a civilized discussion about any statement. Let's say, Hitler was good, as a statement. And then you will be running arguments for this against this. It will be trying to create a tree. And you will be allowing a communal feedback. This is something we don't really have on large scale. If you think about this, most of the democratic processes are either country level where you go and vote, or a very local level.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We don't really have medium-sized way of giving feedback. So creating standards for this and the technological platforms and tools that would allow this would be super useful for many people in many different communities around the world.
TODD CARPENTER: One of the challenges with collaborative initiatives, and I have one in mind but this extrapolates generally, is governance, particularly when you're talking about different institutions working together towards a common goal. But there are barriers between University x and University y that are some, in parts, local, legal.
TODD CARPENTER: They might be governance structures. How do we create an environment that supports collective decision-making that allows for this flourishing of collaborations, particularly when there are real-world separations between entities?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: I would say that, of course, the problem is very real. And there are probably many approaches to this. But my personal take is that such a change could be driven by just a good tech, just good thing-- good, small thing that will change how we operate our life. And I'm thinking, for example, about Doodle. Doodle is such a simple solution that is changing the way people interact. Or Tinder, for that matter, it's changing the way people match.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So I think that platforms and technologies can actually run such a change in governance as well, and especially if it combines qualitative feedback with quantitative feedback so people can say why they like it, but also we can see how many people like it. It will be very important. And we do not really have tools for this yet, especially for-- it's usually either a forum, and you would have to read hundreds of pages to get this qualitative input, or you just have, vote up, vote down.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Combining this thoughtfully would, I think, will be the next big thing.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. I think there's also a challenge. And I don't know how to get past this. It's easier to change a tech interface than it is to change human behavior and human culture, that there's a lag in, particularly, how governance works in these things. It's probably easier to just change the user interface or change the questions on that form.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Bear with me here. You're absolutely right. Culture doesn't change at all until it does. And I think if we look at a tool like Google Calendar, it changed human behavior tremendously without us noticing. So I would say, as long as we accept the tool, and it's transparent-- we don't even see around us-- it will very likely change the way we behave. Even the pandemic, how many of us will actually return to the same old, same old in the office.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: It's enforced, of course. It was forced on us. But the technology that we started to use are, well, are changing behaviors
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. Well, Dariusz, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciated your talk. As I said, I particularly liked the way that it ties back to NISO and our work. But I think the implications of what you were talking about struck a chord with many of the people listening, just based on some of the comments that I've seen. So thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
TODD CARPENTER: So I'm so pleased to welcome you to the second of the keynotes of NISO Plus. And to introduce our speaker today, I'm going to introduce to the stage Rich Kobel. He is vice president at Straive, one of the significant sponsors of NISO Plus this year. So Rich, over to you.
RICH KOBEL: Thank you, Todd. I just want to say that we're very happy to be sponsoring NISO Plus 2022. And it's a great pleasure to introduce Dr Dariusz Jemielniak as the closing keynote speaker. for those of you in Europe, Middle East, and Africa Dr. Jemielniak is Professor of management and head of MINDS, that's Management in Network and Digital Societies at Kozminski University in Poland. Dr. Jemielniak's work focuses on social data science and collaborative society, open collaboration projects such as Wikipedia, FLOSS, strategies of knowledge, intensive organizations, and virtual communities.
RICH KOBEL: In 2015, he was elected to the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. In 2019, he was elected to the Polish Academy of Sciences as the youngest member in social sciences and humanities in its history. He is also currently a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Dr. Jemielniak's talk is entitled, Collaborative Society Needs Institutional Support.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Many thanks. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. It's awesome. It's a great honor, great opportunity. And indeed, I want to talk about a collaborative society and why it needs some support. And to start, I just want to say that I'm basing on my work from Collaborative Society co-authored with Aleksandra Przegalinska, a little bit with Common Knowledge, An Ethnography of Wikipedia.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And my research is basically using this big data approach, which is combining data science with ethnography. Now one thing I wanted to show you to start off the conversation is the interest over time according to Google Trends, comparing information society with sharing economy. And as you can see in October 2014, already, sharing economy was more popular on the internet than information society, which for years, was the buzzword of the day.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Now everybody's talking about sharing economy, everybody and their dog. Every single corporation is trying to get on this train. And indeed, it has a great premise. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers research, the sharing economy is going to be definitely the next big thing. 2013, it was just 5% of the economy. They're projecting in 2025, it might be half, half.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We already know-- this research is about a year and a half old. We already know it's not going to happen to that extent. But it's still going to be definitely big. And what I want to say, and probably, this particular point is not going to be very surprising to you, given the fact that you're in information studies, in the field yourself, is that we shouldn't be even talking about sharing economy in this sense because it's neither sharing nor economy, especially in this popular discourse.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And people are talking about sharing economy. And they mean, Uber, maybe, Airbnb, and the likes. And I think the problem with this particular misdemeanor is that it's not really referring to the sharing as we understand it in the society. The notion of sharing economy is actually very popular in this, for sure. But it often denotes just like capitalism. And Uber and Airbnb, if you think about it, they are basically extensions of lending apartments, of using cars to transport people.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So the premise of accommodating underutilized goods is most of the time very overrated. True. Uber, Airbnb, and many other platforms do offer an added value. But this added value is not really about sharing the underutilized goods. When you look at the big picture, the percentages, it's basically business as usual.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: People who are driving Uber, they try to make a living. People are buying apartments to rent out on Airbnb is basically a new modality of conducting business in these particular industries Moreover, when you think about it, this juxtaposition, this sharing being opposed to selling in the normal understanding, shows very clearly that Uber and the likes undermine the pre-existing culture of sharing.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Remember when was the last time you asked somebody to give you a ride to the airport? The reason you didn't is exactly that it's easier to take an Uber. So it's actually the unsharing economy, undercutting the sharing principles, the sharing traditions that we all had. Sharing a ride, riding somebody to the airport used to be a very important symbolic ritual of showing somebody you care, of showing somebody that you are their friends or close family member.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Now it's basically off the table, just like with the water. And probably you know that in the 19th century, water became a commodity. Then it gradually became something we put a value on. And nowadays in some countries, it's even difficult to get free water. If you go to a restaurant in Europe, getting a bottle of free water is definitely something you-- it would be a luxury to get.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: In the US, it's a little more popular. But nevertheless, water became commodified. Here, we are commodifying rides, we are commodifying giving somebody a couch. If you think about it, of course, if you had a roommate, they had a hairdryer, and you told them, hey, could I use it. And he said sure, it'll be $5. Very clearly, it's the opposite of sharing. It's just the opposite of that.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So here we understand it, the sharing principle the sharing part of this term is definitely a little off its semantic value. And finally, sharing is very important here. Of course, in all those new platforms, sharing could be an important component. But it's the interactions that make the tech change that we're experiencing the most profound. It's not about the economy either.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: If you look at a big picture, if you focus on the economic aspects of that, you're missing the non-monetary aspects of the change. For instance, cooperation for fun, the rituals that the communities create, the reinforcements they are making. And of course, I'm not going to say that the economy is unimportant. The only thing I'm trying to say is that different ways of running industries and businesses, they will change all the time.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But what we are experiencing and possibly missing when there isn't sharing economy as the key term is the much deeper change, the change that is very, very deeply human. There is very solid research showing-- neuroscience is showing that being collaborative is actually more distinctive to humans than opposable thumbs. There are studies showing that little humans, three months old, are geared towards collaboration much more than chimpanzees at this stage of development.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So possibly, we are actually wired to be collaborative. The question, of course, is if we were to collaborate, why don't we see it all around? And I would say we actually do. If somebody stops you in the street and asks you for directions, the first instinct will be to stop and help them rather than optimize the benefit, time benefit gradient, and basically keep moving.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We are geared towards collaboration for a reason. This makes us as species survive. This is how we have been able to survive in much worse circumstances hundreds of thousands of years ago. And this wiring stays on. However, capitalism as a game, a system, makes it a little more difficult. It makes collaboration a little less natural.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Just like with water, when in the 19th century you stopped, you ask somebody if you could use their water from the well, it was a ritual that allowed you to do that. There was a common understanding you're supposed to be allowed to ask for water. Once it gets a price tag, once there is a commodification of this, then the problem arises. And obviously, it's giving stuff away for free.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: By the way, fresh air is still free on this planet. Maybe it will not be so free in a couple of years to come. So the question remains, what is the change? Is the change to commodify, or is there some opposing change happening as a result of platforms? And I would say that the revolution we are observing and that we are sometimes missing when we're talking about a sharing economy is the emerging technologies that make direct collaboration possible.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: They have the collaboration enabling features. And they allow to engage much bigger, broader populations. They act as super multipliers for many effects of collaboration that would be otherwise much less noticeable. And well, I'm thinking about a bigger roadmap for a collaborative society. And I think it's a better term that covers a little more than just focusing on sharing economy. This term shouldn't be used any more.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We can look at the platforms through two different lenses. First of all, the platforms that are made to make profit and that are basically made to foster collaboration. And then we can have users who are oriented at profit and users who are oriented at, basically, something else. In the first bracket, when everybody's trying to maximize profits, sure, we'll have Uber and TaskRabbit Turo.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: It is the classic button capitalism. The gig economy, all those things will probably fall in this bracket. But then we will have users who are profit-oriented and platforms that are cooperatives. This is a little unusual because, typically, when humans are making platforms, will try to make it even more. But we do have time banks, we have food co-ops, peer-to-peer lending systems.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Then we have non-profit oriented users and profit-oriented platforms like Tripadvisor, Yelp, CrowdSurfing, 9GAG, the whole quantified self-movement. And this would be collaborative economy. And this is fine. It's oriented at creating value for the company, but people are spontaneously contributing just to make something good for everybody else. And finally, there's the peer production phenomenon, non-profit oriented users, cooperativist platforms.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And this will be Wikipedia, Alliance, OpenStreetMap, but also citizen science movement, online activism, even MeToo, #MeToo, Occupy Wall Street biohacking, very often not really oriented profit, using platforms that are not really making profit neither. So when I talk about a collaborative society, I'm trying to refer to the phenomenon which is definitely on the growing curve.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And it refers to emergent and enduring cooperative groups whose members have developed particular patterns of relationships through technology-mediated cooperation. So basically, online platforms that foster collaboration. And we see it everywhere. It does include Uber. But Uber is probably not the best example of fostering collaboration.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: It's just marginal from this lens. So what I want to talk to you today and I hope we'll have a discussion, a conversation, is when can collaborative society work and when it can't. So what are the boundary conditions for the collaborative society to actually be able to make the best out of it?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: First of all, I think one of the most important factors for collaborative society platforms to work is that when tasks can be easily compartmentalized into small tidbits that anybody can swallow. Think about it. When you're submitting a review on Google Maps, when you're doing this, there's not much work that is needed. Actually, the base, the minimum, is you just click the number of stars you would give a given establishment.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: What you can add is a couple of sentences of description, you can add pictures, write a very long review. But the bottom line is that it's just one click. The same applies to open-source movement. If you think about the reasons why does it even work, we understand that open source-- and I'm thinking Ubuntu or actually, all these variations but also just regular open-source software that is developed by a large group of people, not just one-man, one-person shows-- is that it is possible to contribute mainly because it's relatively easy to contribute a small part that people can take or leave.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But it is good enough so somebody might come, join, contribute, and leave forever, and it still could be useful for somebody else. This is a phenomenon. GitHub, by the way, I know all GitHub repositories, this is phenomenally showing that this modality of sharing and contributing is a new form of creating new things, new form of collaboration, a new form of producing something valuable for society.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Second, while it's super important, and it's not enough to just compartmentalize work into tiny little tidbits. It's super important also to be able to reduce governance overhead to ad hoc structures. This is very important because if you can reduce governance to structures, you don't have to have leadership that is constantly putting hours into management.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And with spontaneous, collaborative society projects, it's essential there is not somebody who's trying to run it all around. If you are thinking, for example, why doesn't Facebook moderation work well, one of the answers could be it does not try to use the collaborative society approach with dispersed structures, very little management, spontaneous, small compartmentalization run by the community itself.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Third, it's very important that people can easily join and quit without any consequences or long-term commitments because then, people are going to have a big threshold of joining. If you look at Wikipedia, for example, which I will be discussing in a bit, with Wikipedia, the smallest contribution could be just correcting one comma. You don't even need to create a login, to log in on Wikipedia. So you just click Edit, correct comma, go on, maybe not come back ever.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But it's still, you made it a little better. You made the world a little better by correcting this comma mistake if it's easy done. So you join, quit whenever you want. But it also means that governance is much more difficult. Because typically in organizing, one of the biggest tasks that you need to handle, one of the biggest challenges, is that you need to be able to know who does what and when.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We do not get this in a collaborative society platforms. The people come and go. And we do not really have a good way of addressing them. So it has to be organized in such a way that it's possible. Fourth, it's super important for collaborative societies systems to work that the personal trust can be replaced with trust and procedures. And what do I mean by that?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: If you need to trust somebody, some other human, on the other side of the world who has entirely different concepts of culture, of what is right, what is not right, you do not know them personally, it's super difficult. That's why collaborative society platforms very often rely on procedures, technologies, algorithms to streamline this trust, to replace the need for trust onto the procedure.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: For instance, on Wikipedia, if you want to-- if you want to check if the article is good, you don't need to trust whoever wrote it. But with the traditional encyclopedia, you would probably check the reference, you would check who wrote it. On Wikipedia, of course, you can check who wrote this. But this will be very often IP addresses or nicknames that will not tell you anything.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So what is more important is that you need to trust the process. And people who create Wikipedia will need to trust the process. They will need to know that whatever is added and whatever is not added to Wikipedia has followed a very specific guideline, and that everybody else was trying to make sure that this guideline was followed. And finally, one of the boundary conditions for collaborative society to thrive is that commitment needs to be voluntary, non-monetary.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Quite honestly, this one is debatable. And of course, we can discuss it in the discussion part. But I think it's very essential that people contribute as a gift rather than as a transaction. This is why Google's attempt at creating an encyclopedia, [INAUDIBLE] if I'm not mistaken, didn't really work out. They were trying to make an encyclopedia the same way that YouTube works.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But it didn't work because people were more willing to contribute to Wikipedia than to create something with tiny, little royalties from whatever they wrote, especially since collaborative editing, which is the essence of Wikipedia and the essence of [INAUDIBLE] then, was not really giving them that much kudos as shooting a video would. So they didn't have the personal exposure.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And instead, they could enter a transaction. A transaction is not as attractive as being able to do something that's spontaneously put aside. Now about Wikipedia, and I started to talk about it a little bit, what is it? I mean, I'm sure you've heard it's the fifth most popular website in the world. So it's very difficult not to use Wikipedia. Anybody who says they don't use Wikipedia are most likely liars.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But to me, it's not really an encyclopedia, per se. It's the largest social movement on this planet, 43 million named accounts, tens of thousands of people editing every month. And it's probably-- it's something you've heard, in 2005, it's already been proven to be better than Britannica by a study in Nature. The study was definitely debated later.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But since then, Wikipedia has grown 50 times or 50 times bigger. And well, Britannica is, sad to know, basically out of business. So I think the people have voted. And we've had an enormous number of studies showing that Wikipedia is actually very accurate, much more accurate, or at least as accurate as the professional sources.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And nobody really knows why. I'm confessing this to you. I've been studying this for over a decade. We don't really know why it works. Wikipedia doesn't work in theory. It can only work in practice. But somehow, the results speak for themselves. Six million articles on Wikipedia, already, six million.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Year after year, people think, oh, yeah, it's done. We've covered everything. And no, we haven't. There's more articles coming-- over 53 million pages in total outside of content pages, though. Think about it. Almost 10 times more pages. What could be those pages? Some of them, of course, would be categories.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: If you have George W. Bush, there will be category, presidents of United States. Some of this will be thought pages, discussing what should be covered in the article. But the vast majority of this 53 million pages is discussions, the community life, regulations, considerations, debates, how to do this, how to do that. So you see, immediately, there is 10 times more content that is not encyclopedia itself.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There's a budding social life that is self-organizing to create this phenomenal website. And there will be loads of lengthy discussions. There will be-- the major topics will go into hundreds of thousands of words each, which tells us something interesting about the collaborative society, people like And Ostrom, a Nobel Prize winner, once wrote that to make a successful community, you need to give them agency to create rules.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: You need to let them decide how it's going to be organized. It will be another good reason why Facebook moderation by the community is not so effective. Because it's basically done by hired guns. Now about Wikipedia, if you look at this graph, one thing is very striking. I told you that it's super important people can come and go anytime they want, right? And it's true that people come and go on Wikipedia too.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We do have a variation in the number of people editing. But if you look at the time between every 10 millionth edit on the English Wikipedia, you see it's amazingly stable. Nearly flat in the very beginning, there was a huge drop. But then for years and years and years, it stays pretty much flat, which means, and think about this for a while, that in months when we have more editors, they added less.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: In months when we have less editors, everybody somehow magically contributes more, which is, I think, amazing. I don't really have a good explanation for it. But I would say that this is a self-regulation in a community that apparently takes this form. And by the way, Wikipedia, has lots of rules. This is probably because people want to create rules to feel they own it.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But it's already getting to the level of insanity. There are over 1,000 regulatory documents, even just 50 policies total to 150,000 words. So it's definitely a weird phenomenon, especially for spontaneous, open, self-regulated community. All decisions are participatory. Anyone can propose changes, demand answers. And decisions are based on consensus rather than plain voting.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: One thing that might surprise you if you have not looked into Wikipedia is that Wikipedia doesn't care about truth. And if I say this, people think, what Wikipedia Foundation Trust, it says that Wikipedia doesn't care about truth. Well, yeah, it doesn't. It only cares about verifiability and sources. And if you think about it, that makes perfect sense. If we cared about the truth, we would have to determine what the truth is.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There are so many, in science even, very often, there will be contradicting paradigms, contradicting theories. And we do not want to do that. We do not want to decide what the truth is. What we want to do, though, is create a process, as I told you, create a process create a structure, create a system that will allow, for any theory that is properly covered in academic journals to be reflected.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So it's about us being able to verify the content that was [INAUDIBLE] and us about using the proper sources. And they have to be, of course, proportional to the topic. If we're talking about. Hip-hop, it doesn't have to be necessarily an academic journal. There is the proportionality of the sources. But again, the essence stays that it's not about truth, it's about the sources.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And finally, there's this very interesting rule that, I think, shows how collaborative society, communities, actually can thrive that ignore rule, all rules. It's one of the rules of Wikipedia, when the good of Wikipedia demands that you shouldn't ignore other rules when it's very clear that you should do something else. Now Wikipedia is really, really weird.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And when I say weird, I mean, it's not that everybody loves everybody. People are actually entering huge debates, people are entering conflicts, the so-called edit wars. Even such topics as whether the name should be Ivory Coast or Cote d'Ivoire, Keev or Kiev, what should be the spelling of the name, will take hundreds of thousands of words of discussions. Ganges or Ganga.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: By the way, this one is very painful. Because if you live in India, if you hear the name of this river Ganges, you would think, well, it's colonial. It's not really OK to use it. Why are we using this? And especially if you think about the fact that in India, people are native English speaker, just coming from India, I would say there is a very strong argument why it should be called Ganga.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But for now, it's still Ganges I think it's probably because of the dominance of the verifiable sources from the American English publications. But nevertheless, even things like yogurt or yoghurt spelling American versus British spelling will take hours of discussions. To make things even weirder, there was a huge discussion whether Mexico has an official language. And guess what? Three months of discussions, we still don't know.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We do not have-- we couldn't nail it down to a specific document that would state, this is Spanish. Spanish is the official language. We do not have the document. We do not have a verifiable source to claim that. So things like this will take time for community members. Some people would say it's a waste of time. I don't necessarily think so.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: I think it creates culture, helps create a feeling of ownership, and it cements people collaborating around some ideas. So even people will edit for 1/10 of this time they are spending time discussing what should be edited, it's probably still time well spent. Oh, sorry. What I wanted to get to was that we know when the collaborative society can work.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But the question is when-- what are the boundary conditions that make it not work? And the example I wanted to use and I wanted to discuss with you was what was happening during the COVID pandemic. Because I think, especially, this example shows us very well what the potential is, but also what are the limitations of the collaborative society. And if you recall in the very beginning of the pandemic, there was this moment, and we all were scared.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We all were trying to find ways how to behave. And there were a couple of initiatives in the very beginning. People were spontaneously trying to do stuff. If you recall, there were initiatives to produce-- 3D printers to produce face shields. There were initiatives to produce home-made masks. There was a very interesting, super cool initiative on Kaggle Data Science Initiative that was aimed at studying, analyzing data to address the pandemic.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There was quite a number of initiatives, not really, really technology, but using technology to organize themselves. For example, to deliver food to people, to try to help out your neighbors, all this was based on platform, spontaneous typical collaborative society approach. All this worked. However, if we look at it one very specific problem, it didn't really work.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And I want to discuss it a little bit more with you. As you probably remember in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a shortage of ventilators worldwide. Ventilators, as you know, were devices that could decide about a life or death. And we didn't have enough. And the reason why we didn't have enough, even in the United States, was that nobody cared enough about this.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: In 2007, there was this initiative by the American government. We started Aura Project. And Aura Project was basically aimed at trying to produce very cheap ventilators for the public use. But unfortunately, the company that was tasked with it, received the grant, was taken over by a large corporation. And they tried to restart the project. In 2014, if I'm not mistaken, Phillips committed to develop this.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: A couple of years passed, they still didn't. And they didn't deliver the ventilators for the price tag that was set at roughly $3,000, if I recall correctly. But when the pandemic broke, quite a number of initiatives worldwide started to produce ventilators with the use of 3D printers, and of course, combining engines and a couple of other mechanisms. And they were quite successful at organizing engineers around this idea.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There was this ventilator project in Poland. Their premise was to produce a ventilator for roughly $100. Very cheap. Sure. Probably not super effective, true. But if their choice was to have this or nothing, suffocating without a chance is probably not a choice any of us would have made. And in Colombia, there was a very similar initiative trying to produce ventilators.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: In fact, when I was trying to track down the number of initiatives like this, there was at least a dozen worldwide that, at the same time, were trying to organize people, engineers, medical doctors around this particular idea. There was an MIT project doing exactly this. There was a University of Florida open data, open blueprints for ventilators project.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And all these initiatives were happening simultaneously, which I think, shows us that one of the problems with the collaborative society is the lack of coordination. We need coordination for these projects to happen. If we have 20 projects, actually worse than if we had one, who is going to choose which one is good? Probably, we're going to choose to go with a brand. So there is an MIT project and 20 others, we are probably going to go with the MIT.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But is it the best approach? I'm not so sure. There is no procedure, though. We do not really have a system of choosing the right blueprint. Moreover, if you look at this particular case, you see that collaborative society is good at organizing people around ideas. But it's not really so good at making sure that something is certified.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Sure, you can produce a device that might save your life. But good luck with finding a doctor that is going to use a device that if not certified. It's not going to happen. If it's not FDA-approved, it's not going to be used. You can use it on yourself, but it's probably not going to happen either because when you need a ventilator, you're not going to be able to apply it yourself. So the problem of regulation and certification, very clearly, for making sure that whoever is using the device is not held responsible.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Yeah. There's a problem of distribution. Sure, you can-- let's assume we produced, created, blueprints of working ventilators. Let's assume 3D printing enthusiasts like Jason could print it at home, maybe buy a little bit of parts here and there, 3D print some, do something else, produce a ventilator. But what next?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: If it gets certified even, are they supposed to deliver it? Are they supposed to distribute it? There's no good system of deciding how to distribute it and how to load balance, the number of ventilators when they are actually needed and where they should go. Because nobody expects people to be collaborative producing stuff. There are legal issues. Ventilate, the Polish startup that was-- they started the Polish movement that was trying to produce the ventilator that cost very affordably and make it open source, one of the problems they encountered was that they received information that if they are going to publish those blueprints, there could be legal ramifications.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And none of these enthusiasts wants to risk with their lifetime savings to-- just because of the idea, right? Nobody wants to take the legal responsibility or legal risk of possibly infringing somebody's patents and whatnot. Later, by the way, they found out it's totally OK. They were not infringing upon anybody's patents. But then they had to make this tough choice whether to publish it or not.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And since none of them were lawyers-- they were engineers, doctors-- it was very difficult for them to go through with this. So these things are very clearly missing from the ecosystem. And when you think about this, we see immediately that the collaborative society can address very specific problems. But most likely when these problems will not occur. So when there is no legal ramifications, when there's no logistics, when there's no certification needed.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: For instance, cluster headaches, a very disastrous problem that the corporations don't really want to tackle all that much, there is not that much money in it, there's a huge open-source community of people for monitoring their bodies. They're using medical devices like this to counter cluster headaches, to find patterns. But this is something that is not very regulated. This is something they can do.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: This is relatively safe and does not require dealing with the three problems that I mentioned. If you're talking about birds recognition in Ornithology, there's a very nice budding collaborative society community of people who are trying to make sure they recognize all birds in the world. And they discovered quite a couple of new species that ornithologists didn't know about, and also to monitor the size of the population of those species.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Super nice, super well-organized. All this works. Wikipedia works. Linux works. But once we get to the point when there is a need for certification, there is the need for some legal responsibility, there is some need for logistical problems, optimization, now we have a lot of hurdles.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So my claim-- and I apologize for I absolutely no idea why my slides just disappeared. The point I was going to make and I want to make is that what we need as a society is to realize is that the modes and modalities of collaboration have changed over the last 20 years significantly. And the law, they're still behind. Just like with copyright, think about copyright.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Copyright has been pretty much stable over the last 70 years. And the practice of using media has changed dramatically. The practice of sharing media with friends and with strangers changed dramatically. The law is very clearly behind. The ecosystem is behind. I think the same applies to the collaborative society. We're observing a situation in which people not only can organize around very complex ideas, they can produce very complex devices, and they can deliver amazing results.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: But in many areas, they will not be able to mostly because of the anachronistic approach to law, anachronistic approach to certification. Who is supposed to even apply for certification if it's communal movement? Who is going to pay for all the fees that are needed? Who's going to pay for the lawyers? So I would say that the society lags behind. We don't have the institutions.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And we need to create those institutions because there's an enormous potential in the collaborative society. There's an enormous potential to solve many problems that needs solving that corporations have not be able to solve for a long time. And it's fine, right, because the corporations are not the only answer. We have NGOs, we have public financing governments.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Corporations can be replaced, but we also have a collaborative society organizing people around ideas and helping them out to produce the amazing results. So what I would like to see and what I think we should be thinking over the future, is how to make this happen in different industries, different sectors that people are able to organize themselves to produce great results, but also that the burden of certification, legal support, the problem of logistics is taken from them.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And if we look a little more closely at examples of where it works, we'll see that even with Wikipedia, which is a relatively easy thing, nobody's going to sue you for a mistake on Wikipedia. It's a collaboratively edited Wikipedia, encyclopedia. So even there, there has to be Wikimedia Foundation. There has to be an institution that is taking the burden off the volunteers. Linux Foundation, similar thing.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We'll have somebody who takes away the burden. The question remains, does it have to be so specific? Does it have to be Wikimedia Foundation? Does it have to be Wikimedia Projects? Does it have to be Linux Foundation for Linux? Or maybe we could think of institutional support for initiatives like this because there are many more. And the problem with distribution of funds is such that the giants will get most of the money.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: The known brands will get most of the money, and small initiatives, not so much. So we need to think about ways in which the collaborative society initiatives can receive proper support in the areas that they will never be really good at, the certification, auditing, legal support, and create institutions that will do exactly this. I see in the comments that, would it be true to say the legal system is half-owned by the corporations and that it's just like company?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Well, finance maybe. Definitely, a good argument to make that in the huge discussion about what is fair, what is not fair, only one side has the resources to lobby in their favor. So the discussions about ACTA2 copyright shows very clearly that the needs of the society are not necessarily very well represented when there is a big fight between corporations.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: New media, old media, but still corporations. Nevertheless, what I would argue is that collaborative society does not necessarily need to try to replace the existing industries and business models. On the contrary, I think there's a very fine niche to do this. I told you about those cluster headaches. If there's not enough money in it for the corporations to even bother, why can't we try to make people who experience cluster headaches lives easier just by making self-organization slightly more affordable and easier to make?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And by the way, there was solid research showing that smart watches, data from smart watches, could predict COVID-19 onset. The question to you is, we have this research that was done on a large sample, doctors, medical personnel, and we know it works, why none of the big players Apple, Samsung, why didn't they introduced this as an opt in possibility?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We know a lot of data about our body. Why didn't they offer this? The answer is obvious. There's no money in it. It's a little bit risky when you want to tell your customer they might be getting sick. There's basically no added benefit. But if people were able to self-organize, create an app that would be giving this exact same information, basically, the same kind of data, this would obviously be socially beneficial.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: I could, of course, go on. But I see that we only have 14 minutes left. So I want to leave a little bit of more time for discussion and exchange of ideas, questions possibly. So if there's anything you would like to raise, please, please shoot.
TODD CARPENTER: Dariusz, thank you so much. It's such a brilliant talk and such interesting ideas coming out of this. We want to encourage participants, if you have any questions or comments, drop them in the Q&A box. One of the things that I found interesting, and maybe this is just my own personal valence in the world, is the way in which you were describing a community organization, the teams of volunteers, which try to solve problems focusing on a lightweight infrastructure and established rules, sounds a lot like a standards organization.
TODD CARPENTER: And we're solving problems for which there is no-- there might not be a market solution where people are going to make lots of money with discovery solutions or metadata formats in order to collectively solve problems. I don't know if you were thinking of standards organizations as you were preparing your talk.
TODD CARPENTER: But I really appreciated it.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Well, I think it's a brilliant comment. I think one of the things that are missing is basically, oftentimes, support for creation of standards, protocols. And people in the collaborative society, they are not able to do it themselves, right? They cannot do this. They do a lot of heavy lifting, amazing things. But they will never be able to do this because it's not even their deal, not even if they wanted to.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So creating something, I think, it's exactly spot on, this is what all those initiatives need. Even Wikipedia, even [INAUDIBLE],, even though there are a lot of hundreds of millions of dollars per year budgets, even they could use a little bit of support, in streamlining support. Because Wikipedia, even reaching out with the message that Wikipedia is just as accurate, it's difficult. Reaching out to libraries, universities, and whatnot.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Sure, WHO partnering with Wikipedia to refer to COVID-19 information to Wikipedia, sure, it's a big strong statement showing that it's accurate. But it's difficult to send this message across. So I definitely agree with you that creating standards for all those citizen science, but also, collaborative platforms would make a huge difference.
TODD CARPENTER: I see that Jason wants to jump in with a question.
JASON GRIFFEY: Yeah, if you don't mind. I actually had a question for Dariusz. So I was really intrigued by the slide about laying out when does cooperative miswork. And I was-- it triggered a thought about how one of the pushes, especially in the US, it may be less elsewhere, but especially in the US, one of the pushes of capitalism is for people to look around at collaborative or communal systems and then figure out a way to privatize them in order to extract-- in order to extract economic goods from them.
JASON GRIFFEY: That's a really common theme here in the US right now with our educational system, with library systems, for there to be these attempted privatization efforts, of what is ostensibly a communal or collaborative resource. How do you see-- what do you see as the ability to push back against that impulse?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Well, I think it's a very real risk. And obviously, in my view, a strong community organized around certain Commons is often able to push back. But there has to be a certain critical mass. So as long as people are self-organized around this, sure, there will be protocols, there will be also enough resources to push back. But very often not so in the local communities or in the areas where there is not enough interest for people to self-organize around this.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And we see it over and over, externalization, of course, and appropriation of value, definitely. But I would say it's not very specific to collaborative society only. It happens in many industries and has been basically kept modality of capitalism operating even prior to technology. So I would say the problem is real, but it does not pertain just to the revolution we're experiencing.
JASON GRIFFEY: Cool. Thank you.
TODD CARPENTER: There's a question here, another comment in the chat asking about standards organizations. Another takeaway from your talk is a huge opportunity for standards of organizations to evolve further to support broader collaborative society that may need help in their specific area of expertise or domain.
TODD CARPENTER: So what are those opportunities, and how can, not just SDOs, standards organizations, but also these nonprofit organizations, generally, support this collaborative work?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: I would say that there is a number of things that those communities really need. And some of them are technological, and some of them are actually procedural, just standard based. Even the protocols for conflict resolution, they are nuanced, difficult. And it's difficult to nail it down to what actually works. We know from Wikipedia, comparing it to YouTube, or comparing it to Facebook, that different approaches to conflict resolution, arbitration, mediation produce very radically different results.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And communities, especially small communities, do not really have the capacity to develop them for themselves. So the ability to take standard modules of what should be done in terms of protocol or conflict resolution or what are the good stages of developing a process of how should the things be done, how should a discussion be run, even small things like when you have a discussion, a group of people who want to share an idea, how to make this happen procedurally, so that it's not just a discussion of friends with wine, but it's rather following a specific standard oriented at finding specific solutions.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: There are methodologies for this even in coaching and business. But people are not necessarily sharing it outside of this particular industry so it could be used in engineering, for example. So I would say even procedures would be super interesting. But technologically, platform wise, there's a plethora of things that could be done. I'm thinking, for example, about a startup Kialo, which is aimed at trying to find a way to run a civilized discussion and take sentences into arguments, so basically, disassemble a statement into arguments.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: And I think it's phenomenal because it's teaching people that you can run a civilized discussion about any statement. Let's say, Hitler was good, as a statement. And then you will be running arguments for this against this. It will be trying to create a tree. And you will be allowing a communal feedback. This is something we don't really have on large scale. If you think about this, most of the democratic processes are either country level where you go and vote, or a very local level.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: We don't really have medium-sized way of giving feedback. So creating standards for this and the technological platforms and tools that would allow this would be super useful for many people in many different communities around the world.
TODD CARPENTER: One of the challenges with collaborative initiatives, and I have one in mind but this extrapolates generally, is governance, particularly when you're talking about different institutions working together towards a common goal. But there are barriers between University x and University y that are some, in parts, local, legal.
TODD CARPENTER: They might be governance structures. How do we create an environment that supports collective decision-making that allows for this flourishing of collaborations, particularly when there are real-world separations between entities?
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: I would say that, of course, the problem is very real. And there are probably many approaches to this. But my personal take is that such a change could be driven by just a good tech, just good thing-- good, small thing that will change how we operate our life. And I'm thinking, for example, about Doodle. Doodle is such a simple solution that is changing the way people interact. Or Tinder, for that matter, it's changing the way people match.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: So I think that platforms and technologies can actually run such a change in governance as well, and especially if it combines qualitative feedback with quantitative feedback so people can say why they like it, but also we can see how many people like it. It will be very important. And we do not really have tools for this yet, especially for-- it's usually either a forum, and you would have to read hundreds of pages to get this qualitative input, or you just have, vote up, vote down.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Combining this thoughtfully would, I think, will be the next big thing.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. I think there's also a challenge. And I don't know how to get past this. It's easier to change a tech interface than it is to change human behavior and human culture, that there's a lag in, particularly, how governance works in these things. It's probably easier to just change the user interface or change the questions on that form.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: Bear with me here. You're absolutely right. Culture doesn't change at all until it does. And I think if we look at a tool like Google Calendar, it changed human behavior tremendously without us noticing. So I would say, as long as we accept the tool, and it's transparent-- we don't even see around us-- it will very likely change the way we behave. Even the pandemic, how many of us will actually return to the same old, same old in the office.
DARIUSZ JEMIELNIAK: It's enforced, of course. It was forced on us. But the technology that we started to use are, well, are changing behaviors
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. Well, Dariusz, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciated your talk. As I said, I particularly liked the way that it ties back to NISO and our work. But I think the implications of what you were talking about struck a chord with many of the people listening, just based on some of the comments that I've seen. So thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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