Who would have thought that the movie Men In Black is a source of great wisdom? As Tommy Lee Jones, Agent K, so eloquently put it to Will Smith, Agent J, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” For the same reason that it would be bad for everyone to know if aliens are living among us, techies need to make sure the focus isn’t on collaboration of one project, but the co-existence of many projects that spawn new ideas. Creating Passionate Users has a great article up about the difference between Collective Intelligence and the “Dumbness of Crowds.”

I won’t waste time repeating what Kathy Sierra has already said over there. In fact, if nothing else check out her explanation of the 20Q game and its relation to collective intelligence. That little 20Q ball is smarter than you, even if you think a dolphin is a fish, it still guesses correctly!

My thoughts about the Dumbness of Crowds is applied directly to the Open Source Community. I’m struggling with learning Linux right now for a couple of reasons. I’m not particularly great with online courses, but since they are the most cost effective, as a boss, I stick with them when I can. A good mentor would be a better situation, but I don’t have any of those around (for Linux). On top of that, I’ve played with Windows for years, so it just makes sense to me.

What does that have to do with Open Source? Well, Linux is one of their crown jewels, right? You’d think that after years of development with all of the brain power that’s been thrown into that operating system that it would be easy for me to understand it. Right? Wrong. First, the guys that have the knowledge tend to be uber-geeks, who know their stuff, but think I should do everything from a command line. I like my GUIs and I should be able to do almost anything from a GUI that I can do from the command line. If I can’t, to me, that’s a huge design error. Ultimately Linux still wants me to use programs from the command line combined with a laundry list of -a -x -whatever in order to be quickly done with a project. Throw in the fact that companies like Red Hat are looking for ways to make money on “open source” and I’m really not impressed.
My other issue is when the personalities in a crowd win out and you see an open source project die. That’s my biggest fear when looking at products. Would I love to replace Microsoft Office at work? Totally. Is it feasible? Perhaps, but what happens if development on OpenOffice suddenly died? I’m up a creek without a paddle. And on top of that, a ton of Open Source projects lack good documentation, so what was saved in costs up front, ends up being charged to an employee’s time.

I digress. Back to the original point of the Dumbness of Crowds. I’ve seen it in action firsthand throughout my life. Just watch when a coach asks a team what they’d like to do. You get 20 different answers, none of which actually work. But when you allow a couple of older players pull aside their younger counterparts and transfer their knowledge, it’s Collective Intelligence at it’s finest. Come back a couple of seasons later and see how much more is transferred to the next generation.

Weird, maybe we should just look for the Autobot Matrix of Leadership?