World Knowledge Dialogue

Pour un public largement académique, j’ai donné début septembre une présentation au World Knowledge Dialog dont je reproduis ci dessous le résumé. Trois jours passionnants, avec de nombreux speakers (conteurs parfois) illustres, tels que Joël de Rosnay, Hubert Reeves, la participation de trois prix Nobel, John Sulston (Institute of Science, Ethics and Innovation, University of Manchester), Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany) et Richard Ernst (ETH Zürick) et un prix Pulitzer Edward O. Wilson (Harvard University) ; sans compter l’exposé des nouveaux travaux de recherche de Pierre Levy, connu pour ses réflexions sur l’intelligence collective.

Le programme en espérant la mise en place des enregistrements vidéos dans des temps raisonnables.

Mise à jour

Vidéos et photos sont disponibles sur le site dédié au symposium, ici et là.

Lien direct pour ma présentation, ici

Summary of my talk

Until recently, most people were confined to relatively limited economic roles, whether as passive consumers of mass-produced goods and services, or as passive employees restrained within organizational bureaucraties. Situation is shifting. Due to deep changes in technology, economy, demographics, we are entering a new age where people participate in the economy like never before. The growing accessibility of information, a computer, and an internet connection liberates people to not only become actors themselves, but also give them the opportunity to reach out to very large number of people in the world. In the past few years, the new participation has reached a tipping point where millions of connected people join forces in self-organized collaborations that cocreate new goods and services that rival those produced by our best companies.

The economics of production have changed significantly as we moved from an industrial economy based on scarcity, to an information-based, attention-based economy. In the industrial economy, many opportunities were constrained by costs. Financing was needed to produce, to advertise, and to distribute. Unlike before, where costs of production were high, people can now collaborate and share the creations at a very low cost. Wikipedia is an example of such a shift. Collaboratively written encyclopedia, authored by ten of thousands of volunteers, it is a digital commons of 10 thousands articles in over 250 languages. It runs on a wiki, collaborative software that enables users to edit the content of Web pages. Unlike traditional encyclopedias which favor credentialed knowledge producers, hierarchical production model, and expert validation process, Wikipedia favors amators, flat governance, and circular peer-review. Despite the risk inherent to an open project, it rapidly grows in scope, quality, and traffic.

The presentation will try to give keys to understand how a loose network of peers such as Wikipedia contributors can assemble an encyclopedia that compete head to head with traditional commercial encyclopedias. Community dynamics, governance, power structure, motivations of participants, influence of culture and language will be some of the themes discussed. Some trends and uncertainties regarding intellectual property rights and economical consequences of a shift toward a knowledge society will be raised.