Analyzing and Comparing Model-Authoritative and Model-Democratic

Project: Analyzing and Comparing Model-Authoritative and Model-Democratic

Investigate two basic and fundamentally different models for knowledge creation, accumulation, and sharing:

MODEL-AUTHORITATIVE - identify its strength and weaknesses

This model is characterized by a small number of experts acting as contributors and a large number of passive consumers. In such cultures, strong input filters exist and creates barriers based on the following:

• large organizations and high investments for production are required (e.g., film studios such as those in Hollywood, newspaper production facilities);
• substantial knowledge is necessary for contributions (e.g., the need to learn highly specialized high-functionality tools); and
• extensive quality control mechanisms exist (e.g., strict review criteria leading to low acceptance rates for conference papers and journal articles).
• quality and trustworthiness of the accumulated information is high because the strong input filters will reject unreliable and untrustworthy information
• Based on the smaller size of the resulting information repositories, relatively weak output filters are required.

MODEL-DEMOCRATIC - identify its strength and weaknesses + describe and create new input filters

• characterized by weak input filters allowing users not only to access information but some passive users become prosumers.
• The weak input filters of MODEL-DEMOCRATIC result in much larger information repositories, with the World Wide Web being the prime example.
• major limitation: the potential reduction in trust and reliability of the content of the information repositories based on the weak input filters.
• large information repositories are a mixed blessing
  • exploit existing and develop new output filters (e.g., powerful search mechanisms to find relevant information, collaborative filtering, recommender and tagging systems, and user and task models to personalize information