Plays Well With Others - A podcast by Creative Commons

?Ryan Merkley:I'm Ryan Merkley, and this is Plays Well With Others.Ryan Merkley:(singing).Ryan Merkley:It's a podcast about the art, science and mechanics of collaboration. With every episode we want to dig into what makes collaborations work. Ask yourself, when was the last time you headed into a meeting and thought, I'm going to be a great collaborator today? We focus so much on leadership and not nearly enough on working well with others. With this series, we hope to change that in our own small way.Ryan Merkley:I have a love hate relationship with ants. My first apartment, a little third floor studio in Toronto's East End with a galley kitchen had ants in the walls always waiting for their opportunity. Just a few crumbs left on the counter would undoubtedly result in a long, long line of ants marching back and forth to collect their prize, disappearing back into the lair until next time. Around the same time, a friend and I had started a consultancy and we named it Ant Farm, because no matter how much I hated my tiny invaders, those resilient little ants had given me a perfect metaphor. Working largely underground and unseen, lifting a hundred times their own weight, and silently collaborating to complete their shared tasks.Ryan Merkley:We can learn a lot from ants and how they work together. But what do an army of ants and an online encyclopedia of everything have in common? We'll get there. Let's start by talking about stigmergy.Clint Penick:Stigmergy.Ryan Merkley:Now according to Wikipedia, stigmergy is a consensus social network mechanism of indirect coordination. Put more simply, each action leaves a trace, and that tiny trace invites the next action, either by the same actor or a different one. Stigmergy is what ants do. Asynchronous massive scale collaboration.Ryan Merkley:The people who write and edit the articles on Wikipedia call themselves Wikipedians. They know all about stigmergy. Or at least they should, since it's almost a perfect description of how Wikipedia itself is made and maintained. In this episode we'll have a little fun as we put ants and Wikipedians side by side to explore a synchronous distributed collaboration.Ryan Merkley:Can you hear yourself in the headphones?Katherine Maher:I can hear myself in the headphones.Ryan Merkley:Okay.Katherine Maher:Is that better?Ryan Merkley:That's Katherine Maher.Katherine Maher:My name is Katherine Maher, and I'm the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and we are the nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia.Ryan Merkley:Katherine and I spoke outside of bakery and restaurant in San Francisco for this interview, I'll apologize in advance for a little bit of background noiseKatherine Maher:And even if somebody writes the whole article from soup to nuts, from A to Zed, it doesn't stay that whole person's article for very long. So I know that I've written a successful article when somebody else comes along and changes it.Ryan Merkley:Katherine's job is unlike that of any other nonprofit executive. It's a combination of management, fundraising, and next level distributed community building. Wikipedia is written, assembled, and governed by one of the most wide ranging global communities you could imagine. It's also the fifth most popular website in the world and one of the most trusted sources of knowledge online.Ryan Merkley:Every article is shared freely. No fees, no paywalls, no ads. They use Creative Commons licenses for that, which allows anyone to reuse the content they find on Wikipedia so long as they credit the source and share any new works they make under the same terms. What Wikipedians build, they build for everybody.Ryan Merkley:Wikipedia is unique but so is the process they use to make it. What you might not know is that every single fact, citation, image, and comma was put there by a volunteer, and anyone can edit almost any article. It's a collective act, and a collective gift to all of us.Katherine Maher:I've always loved the humility of the fact that you have these people who make something like Wikipedia work, who consciously self identify with the people who very often we don't even recognize as being in the room.Ryan Merkley:And Wikipedians are interested in everything. Over 80,000 editors from every culture, community, language and location. Every contributor works at their own pace, at their own direction, and in their own way. Whenever a current event or a new discovery increases the sum of all human knowledge, or someone vandalizes a page to serve their own agenda, Wikipedians spring into action. They get a little help from some friendly bots, which they also made themselves, but the hard labor at Wikipedia is done every single day by people with a passion for shared knowledge. You'd be surprised how much they have in common with ants.Clint Penick:Yeah, so if you go back to when I a kid and would disturb a fire ant nest, basically how they were able to rebuild that nest was communication using stigmergy.Ryan Merkley:This is Clint Penick.Clint Penick:My name is Colin Penick, and I am an assistant research professor in the Biomimicry Center at Arizona State University.Ryan Merkley:A funny side note about Clint, his high school punk band was called, wait for it, The Army Ants. So yeah, he's really into ants. One time he sent ants into space with a little help from NASA.Clint Penick:I've been interested in ant since I was pretty young.Ryan Merkley:And his followup band Kids Like Us was pretty good too. No ant songs though.Clint Penick:So as someone who grew up in the South, I had fire ant colonies in my yard. It's a pretty common observation in the Southeast. And so as a normal kid, I would mess with them, and I would pick at their nests.Ryan Merkley:I asked Clint to describe to me how ants work together to respond to an issue or to build something new. And it turns out that the process is pretty similar to what Wikipedia and most open software projects do to build their project.Clint Penick:They build these mounds out of dirt. And what's always sort of interesting about it, when you brush away and you damage part of their mound, you see all these ants rush out. They're behaving kind of hectic and crazy. When you watch any individual in that colony, it seems like they're kind of doing stuff that's not adding to the whole. They're not this well oiled machine. And so if you stare at them for a few minutes, as a kid I would get pretty bored. And so then I would walk away and go do something else. But then you come back an hour later and they've perfectly rebuilt the structure.Clint Penick:So what happens is the ants notice that something has damaged the area. They send out an alarm pheromone which recruits a bunch of other ants that come. They look around, they were like, oh, I'm standing outside, I'm not sheltered in my nest. And what they do is they start looking for grains of sand or dirt and they just start piling them up randomly. The next ants that come along as they're grabbing a piece of dirt, they look at the environment and they say, oh, well there's already a pile starting over here to my right, I'm just going to add to it. And so they add to that pile. And so over time you just have these individuals that they sort of start to accumulate. They basically have to pass a threshold or a critical mass. And so once you have a critical mass of dirt that starts to get piled up, then a bunch of ants are building it up, and they start to form it into a tunnel, and then the tunnel is constructed and they move on to the next thing.Ryan Merkley:There's no grand editorial plan behind Wikipedia. Now that comes with its own downsides, but that is for another episode about bias, inclusion, and privilege. For now, let's just note that most Wikipedia articles come into the world in a similar fashion. An editor starts a pile of facts, sentences, and citations, and refines it. As they begin to shape it into something coherent, other contributors become aware of their work. Usually through a series of automated notifications that flag edits, new pages, or deletions, and then they join in to contribute their own elements until it becomes a full blown article. That is stigmergy.Ryan Merkley:There is a concept in a collaboration called stigmergy.Katherine Maher:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ryan Merkley:I learned most of what I know about stigmergy by reading Wikipedia.Katherine Maher:On Wikipedia.Clint Penick:The actual term stigmergy was invented by a French biologist in the 1950s. He was looking at when you damage a termite nest, how are they rebuilding the pillars in the nest? And so that's when he noticed this idea that the first termites that came up, they would just lay mud down everywhere, but they would stick a little pheromone in the mud as well.Ryan Merkley:So this pheromone is a marker, or maybe more like a beacon, to call and direct other termites to the work.Clint Penick:But then if three termites smell it and quickly add to it, then it's amplified that pheromone signal. Then all of the termites just converge on building a pillar there to connect the roof back. And so this is this concept of stigmergy, that the termites aren't saying, hey, we have this plan, this is what a pillar looks like, and this is what we all need to build, and calling all their nest mates to come over and help them. Basically all they have to do is lay down the equivalent of a brick. They're laying down a brick of mud that has some pheromone in it, and then this whole process just emerges from the ground up.Ryan Merkley:This seemed like a good time for me to ask Katherine what she thinks Wikipedians might say about being compared to ants.Katherine Maher:I don't think anyone would be offended. I suspect that they would go read the article on ants. I'm not even kidding. My suspicion is that Wikipedians are builders, and they're maintainers, and they tend to be incredibly open-minded people who try to withhold judgment until they have information. And so if you were to tell them that Wikipedians work a lot like ants, then they might be going, well, what kind of ants? The ones that build anthills above ground? The ones who build below ground? Are we talking giant black ants? Are we talking red ants? Are we talking African ants?Katherine Maher:I think people would be very interested in understanding very specifically what the nature of the comparison is. And frankly, I think they'd be flattered. Ants are pretty remarkable. I mean, can't they lift something like 20 times-Ryan Merkley:100 times their own weight.Katherine Maher:100 times their own weigh, yeah. I mean that's the average Wikipedian, right? The average Wikipedian is building something that a hundred, a thousand, a million people might see on the basis of one contribution. So yeah, I think ants could be heroes.Ryan Merkley:And that no ant could build on it's own.Katherine Maher:And then no one ant can build on its own.Katherine Maher:What I think makes Wikipedia so interesting is that that dialogue is asynchronous. And it is not even asynchronous in the sense of I put something out there in 48 hours, I expect someone to come along, it's asynchronous in the sense of I put something out there and 17 years later somebody might come along and change it. And then with the anticipation that 17 minutes after that, it could be changed again as well.Ryan Merkley:And those kinds of decisions don't scale at all. They have to be made one after another within an established structure with rules and guidelines and many people playing many parts.Ryan Merkley:Before we beat this comparison into the ground, let's look at one last striking parallel. The need to divide up the labor into roles and responsibilities. Inside the ant farm, there is specialization and there are divisions of labor. And inside the global project that is Wikipedia, each contributor self-selects for the work that needs to be done, and takes on the role that suits their skills and interests.Clint Penick:So ants, there's a quite a large diversity of ants. A group that might just be a few dozen workers in a colony at most for a particular species, ranging up to some army ants and driver ants have over a million ants in a single colony. And so what you see is a spectrum of specialization and which types of tasks that ants perform as you get to larger societies.Ryan Merkley:There is a lot of potential for failure in an uncoordinated distributed asynchronous model. You would not be wrong to think that Wikipedia could become an endless trash heap of poorly written articles, incomplete sentences, and broken links that are unusable and unreadable. But that is not what Wikipedia is known for. It shouldn't work, but by and large it does. Katherine often says it doesn't work in theory, only in practice.Katherine Maher:I mean, I don't know. Wikipedia is always kind of on the verge of falling over. It's what makes it so great. The way it works is because it's this elegant combination of humans and machines. So they're really low level stuff that the vandalism that happens between the hours of 8 to 3 PM, that's all school kids. As you're giving me this quizzical look. Between 8 to 3 PM, we see tremendous vandalism. Things like injections of the word poop into articles. I know, I know. Maybe kids these days use worse language.Katherine Maher:But we have bots that track for that sort of thing, and those bots run from one end of Wikipedia to the other. They look for the missing Oxford comma, they look for misappropriations of language, they look for vandalism, and then they revert. And those are very simple, non-complex, non-higher order function decision making. And then we also have, as I mentioned with things like our changes feed, the ability to run basically algorithms, machine learning based algorithms, across the entire site, and say, we think this is a good edit, we think this is a scandalous edit, we think this is a intentional contribution, we think this is somebody who is trying to mess with the sites. And then editors can triage quite quickly to say, well, I'm just going to let that one go because that one's probably fine, or this one demands closer attention, or this one demands an immediate fix.Clint Penick:Yeah, I mean I think part of it is just really outlining simple rules, and so that's how it works in insects. If you have a clear set of defined rules, individuals don't really need to have a lot of extra communication on top of that. They can just jump in, they can do a little bit of work, and they can walk away.Katherine Maher:Those are both machine augmented. And then you have just the sort of very simple force of notification, which is someone just made a change to the article about HIV and AIDS, and 2000 people just got a notification that change occurred. Someone in the world is awake and is going to see that and is going to come in and respond and evaluate that change in a really manual way.Ryan Merkley:And not unlike the fire ants that jumped into action after young Clint smashed their backyard anthill, the Wikipedia community does the same thing to rebuild and repair what's been broken.Ryan Merkley:Clint described how ants search for food. A scout ant will go out searching, and when they find something tasty they will begin to release pheromones as they return drawing a straight line back to the nest. The rest of the ants then follow those chemical signals directly to the food and get to work. If the find is plentiful, the worker ants leave more pheromones as they return as well, so that each and kind of traces over the path to make it stronger. When the ants look at all the paths the scouts have made, they can see where to focus their attention. And those pheromone trails fade out over time, so that if a trail falls out of use, the signs marking the path fade away. But if the ants are using the path actively, they'll keep reinforcing it with their own pheromones, and it will stay bright in their view.Katherine Maher:I have to wonder, given that we talk so much Wikimedia about how Wikipedia is incomplete, if there's also something to be over-learned from ants, which is that bright line path. How if you are sated based on finding the resource you need, how does that then perhaps preclude you from venturing further afield? And so one thing that Wikipedia, a legitimate critique that is often levied at it, is that for all of its disruptive nature and that anyone can contribute, it has in many ways simply recapitulated the canon of knowledge of what we think of as encyclopedic and as irrelevant and important. And so I'm curious where and how we might need to dissociate ourselves from ant in order to follow our pheromones less and to venture further field even if it means that some of us aren't coming back.Ryan Merkley:A few final thoughts. Well, much of today's episode describes a system that seems to function like clockwork. The reality is much more complicated. Today's Wikipedia is the result of a lot of deliberate and iterative work to establish structures, rules, and systems that support collaboration. There are committees, plans, strategies, software, and AI, and thousands of humans that agree and disagree, make it all work and fix it when it breaks.Ryan Merkley:In nature, ants evolve their processes over thousands of years of evolution. At Wikipedia, community shaped the tools, rules, and norms that govern the project, and that's probably my biggest takeaway here. In both cases, the structure sets up each contributor for success so that they can play their part and move towards the goal. It also sets a framework that fails well. If one ant doesn't show up for work, the colony doesn't starve. Another one just steps in.Ryan Merkley:After many years working as a collaborator with Wikipedians, I've seen how much work goes into refining those systems. They struggle with it, because community is hard, and human systems are messy. One last insight. There's a real value in defining the roles that enable collaboration, both formal and informal. Defining who does what is important, but it's also important to set out a path for those skills to pitch in. Those elements, structure, rules, and pathways are all essential to a successful distributed model of asynchronous collaboration. And Wikipedia isn't just trying to make the system work today, they're challenging themselves to figure out how to make it more open and more equitable for the future.Ryan Merkley:I think we can all agree that trust, facts, and shared knowledge have never been more important in our society. Some might say it can't work in theory, but in practice it just might save the world.Ryan Merkley:Thanks for listening. Plays Well With Others is also a collaboration. The show is produced by Eric Steuer, with additional production and editing by Andrew Steven. I'm your host Ryan, Merkley.Ryan Merkley:This month's show is brought to you by the Portuguese word for collaboration, which is.Teresa Nobre:[foreign language 00:21:33].Ryan Merkley:That's Teresa Nobre, part of CC Portugal, the hosts of this year's CC Global Summit in Lisbon. You can join us and learn more about the summit at summit..Ryan Merkley:The show's theme music is by Graydon James of the Young Novelists. Oh, and a note about the theme. You might have noticed that the music at the beginning of today's show sounds just a little different than it did in our first episode. That's because Graydon is adding new elements to the track each time we use it here. More on that in a future episode.Ryan Merkley:This episode contains additional music by Blue Dot Sessions, which is available under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license at the Free Music Archive. We also use sound effects from Freesound. You can find links to those tracks as well as more information about our show at .Ryan Merkley:This series is supported by Creative Commons. We make the free CC licenses that anyone can use to share content and knowledge under simple permissive terms, including the ones that power Wikipedia's shared content. Each time someone shares their work, they invite asynchronous collaboration with the world.Ryan Merkley:I'm @ryanmerkley on Twitter, and our show is @playswellpod. We'll be back in about a month with another episode, so make sure to subscribe to our show on whatever podcast app is bringing you these dulcet tones. ................
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