SXSW: Open Knowledge vs. Controlled Knowledge

Participants:

Rob Capps, Wired Magazine
Brett Gaylor, Basement Tapes
Hermai Parthasarathy, Public Library of Science Biology
Gil Penchine, Wikia
Francesca Rodriguez, moderator (Creative Commons)

We are obsessed with looking good.

As a SME in community at AA|RF, I often speak with clients about opening up their digital ecosystems by enabling the consumer's voice via social media, such as blogs and ratings and reviews. The concern I get most often is, “What if someone says something bad?”

This is certainly one of the main questions of Web 2.0.

This panel made some interesting points along these lines. Gil Penchine of Wikia talked about the experience of opening up an entire website to its users. “We believe that people are basically good … and it’s been remarkable to me how good people are,” he said. Wikia gets the “occasional vandal,” he said but if you give the community the power to fix the community then the bad stuff may quickly go up—but it will quickly come down.

He also suggested that if something’s been closed for a while and it is suddenly open then there’s a different psychology that may occur at first. It may take time for that community to build trust.

Case in point, at the beginning, Wikia had seven full-time people around the world, but they now have thousands of volunteers around the site everyday. The challenge is getting people to feel ownership and then giving them the tools.

The fear, says Parthasarathy is that the bad comments will rise to the top. But, she said, if we can find a way to engage communities then the good will find a way to rise to the top.

Capps talked about how Wired is experimenting with putting a developing story online before it is published. While the fear is that competitors will scoop them, the alternate is that they won't waste their time covering the same story. In my opinion, the positive side is that more news gets covered, while the negative side is that there are less voices covering one story.

But I digress.

The point is, there's a battle looming between between fear and hope, and Web 2.0 is at the front lines. Who are you placing your bets on for victory?