From C&T2009 to the TKB

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This week, I'm going to digress from the topic of flow and rank ladders in order to share an interesting talk I heard at a conference. Last week, I was at the C&T2009 meeting at Penn State University with our Chief Community Officer, Joe Cothrel. Although this meeting was rather relaxing for me, because I didn't have to present, I still can't believe it took me 12 hours to get there (9 hours of travel from SFO to State College connecting at DC, plus 3 hours lost from PST to EST). I stayed on campus at the Nittany Lion Inn that is a 5 minute walk to the IST building, the meeting venue location. I will not bother to recap the meeting, since a concise summary can be found in the conference program. However, one talk sparked some thoughts in my head that I'd like to share with you.

Day 2 of the conference opened with a keynote, titled "Knowledge Reuse and Novelty in Community Settings," delivered by Prof. Karim R. Lakhani from Harvard Business School. Prof. Lakhani presented an interesting experiment on collaborative innovation in the form of a MATLAB programming contest for solving an NP hard problem. Each code entry's performance is evaluated, scored, ranked, and displayed immediately with the contestant's name. Since this is a collaborative effort, any contestant may reuse and modify code submitted by others and then resubmit it as their own entry. The contest is closed after about a week and the top score at that time wins regardless of how many times one submits, how many lines of code one adds, or how much performance gain one contributes. The competition is all about reputation, collaboration, and learning; the winner only gets a T-shirt or a cap.

The results of this experiment are quite interesting!

• Novelty per entry is quite low: 3.5% on average.
• Borrowed code per entry is rather high: 71% on average.
• Small chunks of novelty code are often reused, so they tend to have high social values. But code entries that are too novel (have too many novel blocks of code) are often not reused because they are too hard to understand. Therefore their social value decreases.
• In contrary, small chunks of borrowed code are not often reused, so they tend to have lower social values. However, as the sizes (number of lines) of the borrowed blocks of code increase, they become reused more often, so their social value increases.
• Winning entries tend to have few lines of novel code and many chunks of borrowed code. In fact, the amount of borrowed code is twice as predictive of top performance as novelty.
• Finally, collaborative innovation almost always leads to a more optimal solution in shorter amount of time.

Since all communications in a community are persistent and are made available through the internet to the rest of the world, a community is a fertile ground for collaborative innovation. Although the amount of novelty per post is usually negligible, through many iterative refinements by many users from different backgrounds, the solution is often highly optimized and very innovative. This method of innovation and optimization is actually very similar to how evolution optimizes certain biological motifs through natural selection. Computer scientists have found this optimization method so effective that they invented the field of evolutionary computing through biomimicry.

Now, how would you like to run a similar type of collaborative innovation "contest" on your community? Lithium is geared up for a new product that will enable you to reuse the great content in your community, collaborate, innovate and produce highly valuable knowledge base articles. Watch out for our Tribal Knowledge Base (TKB) products announcement soon!