Most important ability the internet gives human society: the ability to share our ideas. Twenty years ago if you wanted to get your ideas out to lots of people all you could do would be to attempt to get an article published or if you had means print a book or pamphlet, today the web has allowed us to share our ideas at almost no cost.
Now we can blast an idea out to the world for comment and feedback, then receive the criticism and new ideas provided to us and improve, refine, and evolve orders of magnitude faster than we could have independently. The term that has been given to this is crowd-sourcing, however, croud-sourcing is a little like fishing with a wide net, you get lots of fish but can also pickup a lot of undesirables as well. Where the tremendous advantages come into play is our ability to communicate directly with the originator of an idea. If you read an article that picks your interest you can google the author and with relatively little effort email them with a question or comment. Outside of academia the process is usually more straight forward such as this, a blog which has communication features built in. (could it mean that the future of peer reviewed journals will be online in a format that allows for appropriately credentialed persons to directly commend in the footnotes of a paper?)
Accelerating intelligence is a very exciting idea because we all benefit when we work towards goals together. Now this doesn't have to be an altruistic or selfless process, in fact I think the capitalism model provides the much needed motivation for doing the work, such as in this case, a new design firm is trying to get it's name out there and has chosen Wikipedia as it's means to do so.
The website which is worth a look lays out a road map for redesigning the online encyclopedia to be more user friendly and more intuitive. They did the work free of charge with the hope of getting people to recognize how valuable their services would be, at the same time providing some very expensive design work for wikipedia.
The company referenced : newisnew
Now we can blast an idea out to the world for comment and feedback, then receive the criticism and new ideas provided to us and improve, refine, and evolve orders of magnitude faster than we could have independently. The term that has been given to this is crowd-sourcing, however, croud-sourcing is a little like fishing with a wide net, you get lots of fish but can also pickup a lot of undesirables as well. Where the tremendous advantages come into play is our ability to communicate directly with the originator of an idea. If you read an article that picks your interest you can google the author and with relatively little effort email them with a question or comment. Outside of academia the process is usually more straight forward such as this, a blog which has communication features built in. (could it mean that the future of peer reviewed journals will be online in a format that allows for appropriately credentialed persons to directly commend in the footnotes of a paper?)
Accelerating intelligence is a very exciting idea because we all benefit when we work towards goals together. Now this doesn't have to be an altruistic or selfless process, in fact I think the capitalism model provides the much needed motivation for doing the work, such as in this case, a new design firm is trying to get it's name out there and has chosen Wikipedia as it's means to do so.The website which is worth a look lays out a road map for redesigning the online encyclopedia to be more user friendly and more intuitive. They did the work free of charge with the hope of getting people to recognize how valuable their services would be, at the same time providing some very expensive design work for wikipedia.
The company referenced : newisnew
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