From ON Magazine
By Tim Devaney and Tom Stein
Ross Mayfield on the social nature of information, why he doesn't have to read The New York Times every day, and his interest in knowing "the unknown unknowns."
Ross Mayfield is a pioneer in the field of social software. He co-founded Socialtext, the first wiki company for the enterprise. Like Wikipedia, social software is "group editable," Mayfield says. "It adapts to its environment rather than the environment being required to adapt to it."
You seem to be saying information is different from other commodities, that it becomes more valuable as it becomes more widely available.
Information gains value from decisions. A bit of information that may be utterly worthless for the top decision makers in a company could be discovered by somebody at the bottom of the company and inform a decision that saves the company.
People talk about the information economy as if we're already there. Do you think we have room to grow?
The first part of the information economy was data commodities driving down the cost of storing, processing, and distributing information. The second part will be when information becomes more people-centric than machine-centric. The difference between information and knowledge is social. Some of the most valuable information available is a byproduct of people having conversations. This is a big jump for most companies, which try to treat information as an asset and are still stuck in frameworks of control.
But more and more, we're moving from models where we treat information as an asset to treating it as conversations. When you make this shift, there are things you need to do organizationally or socially, like lowering the threshold for what is quality information. We've seen this as a trend with blogging. There's no formal editorial process to publishing a blog; the editorial process happens in an open and emergent way. And the full story on a topic isn't just one blog post, but the collection of blog posts that string together, through links, to form conversations.
Do organizations understand the value of groups?
Group-forming is not something that's inherent in most organizational structures today. There is one easy group-forming tool broadly available: e-mail. I can form a group with my cc line. But there are all kinds of issues with e-mail, including the information overload you get with a push model of attention management. I have no control over what comes into my inbox. With blogs, wikis, and RSS, I choose what I want to pay attention to and pull it to me at the intervals I determine.
Is there a solution to information overload?
I used to think information overload would be solved by tools and fancy algorithms. But you find a lot of the decisions that are baked into algorithms result in significant false positives. My primary method for coping with information overload is my social network. That's my filter. I don't have to read The New York Times every day because if something is really important, it'll bubble up to my attention. When people are playing active roles in the network and passing on information, those interactions sift through and find stuff that's of value.
Do you have any information heroes?
Joi Ito (CEO of Creative Commons) is a good role model, somebody who works across all kinds of new modalities, discovers new modalities earlier than other people, is constantly experimenting, and tries to live and work in what he calls P-time, which is very unscheduled, ad hoc.
Will the ability to handle information impose a new sort of class structure?
There is already a digital divide. There are people who are simply not connected, many who are connected, and some who are really connected. Part of how folks who are really connected cope is to think it's okay to not deal with everything. You lower the formality of communication, the obligation to respond, and you recognize everybody is at a certain level of attention overload anyway.
Is there information you'd really like to know right now?
Remember that Donald Rumsfeld quote? "There are the known knowns. There are the known unknowns. And there are the unknown unknowns." If there's an unknown unknown that's of value to me, sure, that'd be interesting.
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