Archive for the ‘entrepreneurship’ Category

Was Wikipedia innovation entirely social?

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia in his recent talks suggests that Wikipedia is not a technological innovation, but a purely social one:

When Wikipedia was started in 2001, all of its technology and software elements had been around since 1995. Its innovation was entirely social - free licensing of content, neutral point of view, and total openness to participants, especially new ones. The core engine of Wikipedia, as a result, is “a community of thoughtful users, a few hundred volunteers who know each other and work to guarantee the quality and integrity of the work.”

In his view, Wikipedia is not an emergent phenomena of the wisdom of crowds, where thousands of independent individuals contribute each a bit of their knowledge, but instead is a relatively well connected small community, pretty much like any traditional organization, e.g. one that created Encyclopedia Britannica. Even taking into account that he is a founder of Wikipedia, I still am quite skeptical about this explanation. In my opinion, it is insufficient to explain the phenomenon of Wikipedia. It also disagrees with my own experience as a Wikipedia contributor. I started to contribute in 2003, registered in 2004, and yet I don’t know other wikipedians personally and rarely thought about Wikipedia as a social network, even though it definitely can support one. Reading a post of Aaron Swartz Who writes Wikipedia made me even more skeptical.

I know that it is quite natural for entrepreneurs to focus more on organizational aspects because that is what they deal with most of the time, as well as it is common for technologists to focus mainly on technology. I am not arguing that Jimmy Wales point of view is wrong, but I am suggesting that it might be incomplete. I believe, we don’t need to choose between emergent phenomena and core community point of view. They are not mutually exclusive, so Wikipedia can be (and, in my opinion, is) an example of both.

Jimmy suggests that the Wikipedia technology and software had been around since 1995. I didn’t find any support for this. If the technology was there in 1995, why it took so long for large wiki-based collaborative projects to appear? I did some quick research into the history of wiki technology. It suggests that Wikipedia had no chances to succeed using the technology that existed in 1995. The elements that enabled large participatory organizations like Wikipedia were added to wiki software six year later, at approximately the same time when Wikipedia project was launched.

Early wikis were lacking two important features: revision history and support for concurrent editing. These two features are crucial for success of any mass collaboration project using wiki.

I first discovered wiki quite late, in the summer of 2002. I quickly grasped the potential of this simple and brilliant collaboration tool by Ward Cunningham: a site with web pages that anyone can edit with very low effort. I saw it as a web extension of CVS, a revision control system that allows programmers to collaborate on the same codebase concurrently. However, as I started to explore the potential advantages of wiki, I found that the implementation I was using has a serious limitation. Indeed, everyone could edit a page, unless it is currently edited by someone else. If I wanted to edit a page someone else is editing right now, a warning message appeared that the page is locked. The lock was advisory, meaning I still could go ahead and edit, disregarding the message. However, in this case, either my or other people’s work will be lost. Waiting for the lock to be released quickly becames annoying as more people start collaborating. My conclusion then was that twiki software wasn’t ready to support collaboration of large groups of people. I searched for an implementation that would not have this limitation but didn’t find it at that time. I even wrote a note into my TODO list to write a wiki software that uses CVS instead of RCS so that it could support concurrent editing (RCS and CVS are two revision control systems, but CVS is newer and allows lock-less concurrent editing). However, later I found a software that provided means of concurrent editing. This was MediaWiki software and it was the first wiki I saw that really could support mass collaboration.

Another feature that was crucial to the success of Wikipedia is a revision history providing a mechanism for reverting unhelpful changes. It was not present in the original wikis. In fact, according to Landmark changes to the Wiki it was added in 2002. Prior to this, another mechanism (Edit Copy) was used, providing a single backup copy of every page that can be edited. Edit Copy was clearly insufficient to save content from vandalism as it is too easy for vandals to edit both the working and the backup copy of a page. However, Wikipedia according to the Internet Archive already had revision history on August 8, 2001 (see View other revisions). At that time Wikipedia used UseModWiki software written by Clifford Adams. Again, according to the archive, UseModWiki got its revision history somewhere between December 9, 2000 and February 1, 2001, that nearly coincide with the launch of the Wikipedia project (January 15, 2001).

Jimmy Wales might be right suggesting that Wikipedia was a social rather then technological innovation, but the technology he refers to was not there in 1995. The features that made Wikipedia possible were added to UseModWiki approximately at the same time the Wikipedia was launched and began to use UseModWiki. It might be a lucky coincidence for Wikipedia or those might be new features of UseModWiki requested by founders of Wikipedia. Maybe some of them can comment on this post.

Posted in 3form, collective intelligence, entrepreneurship, evolutionary computation, organization, wikipedia | 4 Comments »

Outdated beliefs about entrepreneurship

Friday, January 12th, 2007

Penelope Trunk has a great post about entrepreneurship. She suggests that entrepreneurship now is different than it was five years ago and compares old and new beliefs of enterpreneurs. After reading her post, I feel I was lucky enough by not knowing the beliefs she labeled as old. I started my first business in Russia in 1991 while being a student. I learned the things she labeled as new after about a year of my experience running the company. My beliefs about entrepreneurship were rather stable over the last 14 years (my variant is somewhat different from the one in her blog):

Old: Entrepreneurs are born with a specific set of character traits.
New: People learn entrepreneurship when they start doing it.

Old: Starting a business is risky.
New: Having a job is risky. Most businesses succeed, most jobs end.

Old: Climb the corporate ladder, learn the ropes, then start a company.
New: Start a company to learn the ropes.

Old: Make a business plan and make sure it’s going to work before you start.
New: Just try it. Start and adapt as you go. When it is done, you can describe it in a winning business plan if you want.

Old: Raise money and spend a lot of it on advertising.
New: Raise no money and spend no money on advertising; spend your time improving your product/service instead.

In fact, it would be quite difficult for me to start anything if I had the beliefs labeled as “old.”

Posted in entrepreneurship | 2 Comments »

How to discover the best people?

Saturday, January 6th, 2007

The New York Times published an article Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm (also available here). The article describes new algorithmic approaches for people selection adopted by Google.

It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.

The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers to whether they have ever tutored or ever established a nonprofit organization.

The answers are fed into a series of formulas created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score — from zero to 100 — meant to predict how well a person will fit into its chaotic and competitive culture.

I didn’t apply for Google employment, but had some experience with their methods of people selection last summer. Google uses a proactive approach to hiring. In particular they actively contact new Ph.D.s and invite them to participate in phone interviews. Google recruiters found my resume on the web and I was suggested and agreed to participate in three phone interviews. Google phone interviews were about 30 minutes each. There were sessions of multiple choice questions and problem solving session in which I was asked to program an algorithmic solution on a piece of paper and dictate the result back to the interviewer. I found that recruiting techniques were not a strong area of Google and approaches were far from innovative. I was puzzled how a company like Google can’t create a simple web application to administer those multiple choice questions or outsource the whole thing to a company that does it better (e.g. Brainbench). Now I see that Google begins to entertain the same thoughts and maybe something will be changing:

“As we get bigger, we find it harder and harder to find enough people,” said Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for people operations. “With traditional hiring methods, we were worried we will overlook some of the best candidates.”

Last month, Haochi Chen and Christian Binderskagnaes (googlified.com) discovered Google Online Assessments that might be a new Google tool to assess people’s skills: “The purpose of this website is still something of a secret, but it’s going to be great, whatever it is.”

We will see how great a new Google algorithmic approach for skill assessment will be. I think they definitely will be more efficient this way saving time of their employees and phone bills. But can they also be more effective? I don’t know the answer to this quesiton. Multiple choice questions still have fundamental limitation: they don’t allow participants to manifest their creativity because they don’t provide a space for any creative solution. They only test ability of judgement.

Another point is well taken by this reddit review

You are creating a society within a society where you weed out undesirables using a simple algorithm. The problem is … whether creativity and innovation can rise out of homogeneity, even the type of homogeneity that Google is practicing.

Human innovation has evolutionary dynamics, cycles of change and selection. My research suggests that innovation and creativity are manifestations of the underlying evolutionary process. In this case, the diversity is crucial as it is one of the main prerequisites for evolution. This is also supported by results of experimental research suggesting that diverse teams of ordinary individuals outperform homogeneous teams of elite individuals (Hong, 2004). So, from evolutionary point of view the loss of diversity is quite dangerous. Google shares this problem with many top Universities.

From the other point of view (my research in social synthesis), diversity is just one way to increase chances to achieve complementarity of resources needed for synergetic exchange. For example, if backgrounds of two people are too similar, they can have little misunderstandings, but don’t have much chance to benefit from mutual learning. On the other hand, if their interests are complementary, they have a great opportunity to learn from each other if they will be able to overcome misunderstandings.

See also my previous post suggesting another way for employee selection that allows to identify creative solutions and people.

Reference:

Lu Hong and Scott E. Page (2004) Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(46), 16385-16389 [link]

Posted in 3form, collective intelligence, creativity, entrepreneurship, evolutionary computation, google, organization, social search | 1 Comment »

So how do you pick good programmers if you’re not a programmer?

Friday, January 5th, 2007

I borrowed a title of this post from Paul Graham’s essay The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups:

So how do you pick good programmers if you’re not a programmer? I don’t think there’s an answer. I was about to say you’d have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can’t recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?

It follows logically from here that software engineering startup should have at least one good programmer to begin with.

This was the case (at least we, founders, believed so) for our first startup in 1991. But we got an opposite and yet analogous problem to solve “How can our new startup can pick a good accountant if we are not accountants?” We didn’t find a better solution at that time than to pick one among us who will learn accounting. However, this general problem is common to many new startups: “how can a group of people pick a good expert in an area where none of the existing members has any expertise?” The previous solution becomes more difficult if you need many experts in different areas and only few founders.

I found another solution unexpectedly several years later. I was using multiple-choice tests to screen candidates for employment. I was unsatisfied with the inability of such tests to identify creative people — exactly the kind of people we wanted to hire. The problem is that multiple choice question offer no opportunity for a creative answer. Therefore, I was experimenting with ways of accepting and efficiently grading of write-in answers. My friends also asked me to prepare some finance questions to test candidates for their company. While helping them and writing questions, I got an idea that this work can be easily outsourced to candidates themselves. Not only it will save my time, but it also will save their time: instead of solving useless test problems that I made up for them, they will solve real problems that their peers need to solve anyway. In other words, it won’t be testing just for testing, but a collaborative problem-solving process that tests their expertise as a side effect. In other words, we invite many candidates and let them ask each other questions about problems they are facing, submit solutions to those problems, and peer-review and evaluate the submitted solutions concurrently and anonymously, using a web service.

At the very beginning, I was not sure that the idea will work. But when it was finally implemented, it turned out surprisingly effective. Not only it discovered good experts, but it also created a useful repository of problems and solutions, sometimes very innovative. Some participants suggested that knowledge exchange and learning experience that this system provides is no less important than the test results. This led to the creation of this website in summer 1998. 3form Free Knowledge Exchange was created to give everyone the opportunity to participate in this process. Over several years, I was doing research that attempts to explain the operation of this system in terms of human-based evolutionary computation and identify the factors that contribute to the efficiency of such computation. The model I had developed is equally applicable to describe the processes happening in another evolving knowledge repository—Wikipedia.

Posted in 3form, entrepreneurship, organization, programming, social search | 2 Comments »

Web services needs and business trends

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

Richard MacManus has a post about the biggest web trend predictions for 2007. It is somewhat relevant to my previous post What internet services do you need? My post was about needs people have, regardless whether entrepreneurs have a trend to satisfy those needs. On the other hand, needs determine many future trends, even if it often takes years for a need to become a trend. So I decided to post here the list of top needs that 3form members would like internet entrepreneurs to address:

  1. Free Internet University, where you can take courses on any subject of your interest, without any kind of obligations and registering. This would allow many people to discover the fun of learning for themselves.
  2. Internet facility should be more free, commercially, and more magnanimous in nature like, the ocean, air, sun for the use by the global human-race as the knowledge is the natural heritage of mankind.True, not in empty stomach but commerce should be ‘just’ for the ‘just’ food-shelter-safety, with an attitude of spiritualizing all the act of our lives.
  3. Free searchable repository of common algorithms (e.g. in C++)
  4. A service that would help you to discover your talents by comparing your abilities with abilities of other people in different areas and telling you what unique combination of skills you possess.
  5. Free email forwarding service with spam-filter capability. It is even ok for it to insert 1% of its own advertisement once in a while, but removing 99% of spam I am receiving.

Again I will try to list some services that partially satisfy those needs (and you can help me with your comments):

  1. Wikipedia and MIT Open courseware
  2. Google wifi and featherwifi.net
  3. Google code search
  4. Bix.com, recently a part of Yahoo
  5. Gmail, Ymail, and most online services provide spam filtering, but it only works if you read your mail online

Despite there are services addressing these needs partially, the supply doesn’t seem to fit demand adequately at this time.

Posted in 3form, collective intelligence, entrepreneurship, social search | 1 Comment »

What internet service do you need?

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

I stumbled on the question “What internet service [do] you need, but still searching… ?” at 3form today. Somebody posted this question back in 1999. As it is one of those questions that are of continued interest to many people (esp. internet entrepreneurs), it pops up from time to time, and here is the version that I got today:

Q4: What internet service you need, but still searching… ?

  1. There are many knowledge only available in the book today, but you can’t find them on the web. For example, photoshop tutorial. So far, I think the free online tutorial can’t compare with those in the book.
  2. Internet facility should be more free, commercially, and more magnanimous in nature like, the ocean, air, sun for the use by the global human-race as the knowledge is the natural heritage of mankind.True, not in empty stomach but commerce should be ‘just’ for the ‘just’ food-shelter-safety, with an attitude of spiritualizing all the act of our lives.
  3. Collaborative platform like www.wiki.org or www.twiki.org that is scalable, in a way that allows people to edit the same pages simultaneously without waiting to obtain lock, etc.
  4. Search engine that actively uses feedback from its multiple users to arrive at better search results.
  5. <A place to add your option>

All these options were posted several years ago. It is interesting to look how those needs were satisfied by internet entrepreneurs and businesses after these options were posted at 3form. For every option, at least one internet service now provides or aims to provide it:

  1. The closest service I know is Google book search, but the quality of online tutorials improved as well (maybe partly due to Google Adsense providing an easy way to monetize and reward high quality content)
  2. There are some initiatives that are aimed to provide free internet service, like Google wifi and Featherwifi.net. In addition, many people leave their wireless routers open to share their internet access with others, esp. in Boston, however, the Internet is still not free in most places
  3. Mediawiki software by Wikimedia foundation solved this and removed many barriers to mass collaboration present in early wikis. It is now powering Wikipedia and many other wiki sites.
  4. I don’t know a search engine that is doing exactly this, but Google started experimenting with user evaluation recently (see also this blog post), maybe there are other search engines playing with these ideas. Please post a comment if you know more. This need, however, is more fully satisfied by websites that don’t call themselves search engines: digg and stumbleupon, both heavily based on user evaluation.

Only one of these four needs that 3form members identified and reported is fully satisfied over these years (the one about locks in wikis). Also it is quite interesting that the need was satisfied not by a business, but by a non-profit organization. Honestly, I am so used to mediawiki software now, so I almost forgot that early wikis were quite different from what we call wiki now. In early wiki, you had to obtain a write lock to edit an article and other user couldn’t edit it while this lock is in place. This mechanism is feasible only for small groups of people editing infrequently. Early wiki also didn’t have a revision history, so there was no reverting mechanism that proven to be crucial to deal with vandalism in wikipedia.

It still takes years from realizing a need to its satisfaction. One of the goals of 3form Free Knowledge Exchange project was to shorten this period and make innovation go faster. I hope next year we will see more cool internet services that help us to satisfy our needs better.

Happy New Year!

Posted in 3form, collective intelligence, entrepreneurship, social search | 2 Comments »