The costs of coordination are falling, rapidly. Our old models for how to organize and leverage the efforts of multiple people across disciplines are being outmoded.
The bureaucratic model has been universally adopted as the standard form for business organization because it has been highly successful. It's a model that has been under development for literally thousands of years. The bureaucratic model emphasizes command and control, and explicitly defines the rewards (payment) for participation. Within a bureaucracy each person has a specific role, and specific pay. The primary benefit of the bureaucratic model is that it manages the (traditionally high) costs of coordination involved in getting hundreds of people to work together on the same problem.
The wiki model, including the open source movement and crowdsourcing, seeks to revolutionize how people organize. The wiki model uses technology to lower the costs of coordination, making it practical to capture value from contributors who don't wish to join a bureaucracy, but do wish to contribute on their own terms. The wiki model lets contributors take on any role they wish. And, the wiki is efficient at capturing value in extremely small increments, one contribution at a time, as opposed to the bureaucratic model which requires the establishment of a formalized, contractual relationship before value can be captured.
A hallmark of the wiki model is a blurring of the distinction between professional and amateur contributors. For example, nearly all Wikipedia contributors are amateurs while Google utilizes both a large professional bureaucracy and the efforts of users to index the web. Unlike the bureaucratic model, in the wiki world people often contribute their effort for free.
This is a problem.
It's a problem because it means that there will not be enough contribution. Technology and the development of the wiki model have lowered the costs of coordination, but those costs still are far from zero. The most important costs of coordination have always been, and still are, the costs associated with transacting for value. The genius of the wiki model is that it captures the value of amateur (unpaid) contributions. But, it's not going to replace the bureaucratic model until it can also capture professional contribution, and this means getting payment to flow from users to contributors.
The revolution is not going to arrive until professional contribution can be bought and sold at the margin. The death knell of the bureaucratic model will be the development of a system that makes it easy to purchase discrete units of professional contribution, instead of having to hire professionals.
3 hours ago
