OpenSource Connections
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When I was in the Army, a useful skill that I had was knowing who could do what and being a favor broker. Managing a much larger network is vastly different.
Gartner recently identified emerging technologies, including the Web 2.0s social networking capabilities. The network is there. The ability to readily both data mine and qualify the network is not.
If you go to myspace or flickr or blogger, you can find a maze of people who have posted random information. As one of the Technorati people says, “50 million blogs…some of them have to be good.”
Yes, some of them have to be good. But how do you know?
First, it helps to know what the tools of Web 2.0 are. Tim OReilly gives a great overview here.
The crux of the value of Web 2.0 is in information aggregation. Most any piece of information that someone could seek is available on the web, but determining where that information is, and, once found, the value of the information remains a challenge. The value creation of the web beyond mere presentation of information (funny how mere presentation of information is accepted; yet, 10 years ago, would have been a taboo thought) is in aggregation and filtering. Here is where folksonomy (defined here:) helps out.
The basic premise behind folksonomy is the same behind market theory. Over time, collective intelligence is better than singular intelligence. So, by using tagging and then community acceptance, information is found, organized, and voted on. It is the Survivor voting off ceremony of the Internet. Good information is tagged, approved, and disseminated. Bad information gets relegated to some dark corner of the Internet or gets sent to your inbox as spam.
However, the data mining capabilities are still in infancy. A business example that we face illustrates this point. When we are ready to take on more developers into our team, we will use a variety of methods to find those people. Craigslist, Linked In, and Sourceforge will be three of our venues, along with others. However, only directly will we be able to use a community vote to determine who the “winner” is. Resumes do not have bookmark counts like they do in del.icio.us. Code does not have a beauty contest.
In the end, we are responsible for the decisions we make. We will still have to review code and conduct interviews ourselves. After all, even if there were a social network for resumes and candidates, we are the ones spending the money to hire, and we can only look in the mirror when we spend wisely or poorly.