On the Power of Crowd-Sourcing.
Or Why You Will Never Make In On Your Own.
So anyway, I’ve been sitting on this idea of electricity-monitoring for about 10 years now, and thought I had it all figured out…
… and a conversation turned up on the open-manufacturing list recently which led to the Internet 0 thing, which is now 5 years old and appears not to have set the world on fire, or at least not yet.
And I always thought that the killer-app for electricity-monitoring would be being able to control your house from the web. This would be the bribe that would get it through the door – and I missed completely the REAL killer-app, which is that with wified home-automation, you don’t need to have wired-in light-switches – which radically reduces the amount of building effort/cost/expertise etc. The driver isn’t novelty-seeking consumerism, it’s the building trade.
Ten years of thinking about this, and I missed what someone with a different perspective saw immediately. This is why crowd-sourced imagination is a killer-app at a higher level. It doesn’t matter if you’re Einstein or Newton or Da-Vinci… you simply cannot compete with imagination coming from a multiplicity of different perspectives.
How does the saying go? 1 point of perspective is worth 80 points of IQ?
Crowd-sourcing doesn’t work for everything, but it’s very good for perspective… and therefore very good for imagination.
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Shelley Noble
That insight is worth everything.
May 24th, 2009
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