Project-8

Project-8: Model-Authoritative versus Model-Democratic — different models for knowledge creation, accumulation, and sharing

Objectives:

1. Study two models of knowledge creation and sharing in online media: Model-Authoritative and Model-Democratic
2. Define Model-Authoritative and Model-Democratic in your own words, based and supported by your own analysis of examples for each model
3. Analyze the content as well as the user activity for representative examples; where do the websites differ, where are they similar
4. Explore the changing roles of curators in Model-Democratic Environments vs. in Model-Authoritative Environments
5. Describe and evaluate existing output filters
   1. Think off, describe, and implement prototypes of new output filters

A Description of the Two Models:

Model-Authoritative

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.

Figure 1: Model-Authoritative

Model-Democratic

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 because human attention and awareness are limiting factors in attending to information?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

Figure 2: Model-Democratic

Starting Points

An example of Model-A and Model-D in the energy domain:

1. VIBE (a portal) http://vibe.nrel.gov/
2. OpenEI (a wiki): http://en.openei.org/wiki/Main_Page

Another example might be online news portal

3. Model-D: User Contributed News Portals (e.g., Digg, reddit)
4. Model-A: Centralized News Portals (e.g. yahoo.com, aol.com)
5. Model-X: Automated News Portals (e.g. news.google.com)

relevant literature:

• Fischer, G. (2009) "Democratizing Design: New Challenges and Opportunities for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning." In Proceedings (Vol 1) of CSCL 2009: 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece, pp. 282-286.
• chapter on “Filter and Publish” versus “Publish and Filter” in Shirky, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organization, Penguin Books,, New York, NY.
• chapter on “RO (Read Only)” and “RX (Read and Write)” environments in Lessig, L. (2008) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Penguin Press, New York.

Sponsor: Holger Dick