Online collaboration can potentially produce an enormous amount of value, as like minds from all over the world, who never would have met otherwise, can contribute to a project. As individuals we are all fallible, but the chance of two people making the same mistake at the same time is slight. Thus exposing our ideas to others can easily reveal flaws that we never would have found individually. Solving those problems then enables new insights.

 

But not all online endeavors produce value... :) Most "community collaborations" are forum discussions. People get to expose their ideas, and hear what others have to say. This is a great benefit to the people involved, and to others who might be following the thread. But what happens to all of that value? After some time has passed, it's extremely difficult to get anything out of a long thread. You have to start at the beginning, because each successive post takes all of the previous posts for granted, and if you don't have the context, you don't understand the statements. So you start at the beginning. A lot of what you read is off-topic chit-chat, which is of no use after the fact. And then, if you read a point that sounds legitimate, you actually don't know if it's true, because it might have been contradicted later. The bottom line is that all of the value actually gets buried under so many off-topic posts, and by the serpentine flow of the discussion. And then, a year later, you're liable to see another thread, discussing the exact same issue, and making many of the same points, sometimes in almost the same order. So once again, people start pouring labor into a thread, because nobody knew that there was already a discussion of that issue, which led to a more advanced position. Sometimes, someone involved in the original discussion jumps in and posts a link to it. But then we're back to the original problem of having to read through an enormous amount of material to arrive at the same conclusion. As often as not, the new thread proceeds in ignorance of what has already been worked out.

 

So how do we mine the value out of these threads, such that each new thread doesn't start over from the beginning, leading a lot of us to believe that we're just going in circles?

 

Every productive discussion should end with a summary of the topic(s) discussed, and the conclusion(s) reached. Then, a new discussion should start by reading the summary of the previous one. If new information has become available, and/or somebody just realized that there is another facet of the issue that hasn't been covered, the new issue needs to be identified and discussed. The conclusion(s) of that discussion should then be used to update the original summary.

 

In other words, for each topic, there needs to be a "master document" that summarizes the basic issues and treatments thereof. Each new discussion starts by reading that document, and ends by updating that document. This way, the next person never starts over from the beginning — everybody starts out where the last people left off. And nobody feels like they are just going in circles. Everybody sees that our knowledge is progressing. If we could mine just 1% of the value that is currently pumped into all of these threads, we could publish a 500 page book every year just with all of the information that was accumulated, and it would be higher in quality than most of the books already on our shelves.

 

Considering the labor-intensive nature of developing and maintaining summaries, the best way to approach this is to set up a to be responsible for each document.

 

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