I’ve recently been reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. It’s an interesting book, and despite many America-centric examples the author uses (which I quickly started to skim over),I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the notion of ‘crowd’ intelligence. As a user and writer of Free Software, I was particularly keen to read the chapter on decentralisation, which uses GNU/Linux as an example of where decentralisation has been successful. On this subject Surowiecki writes:
“Unlike Windows which is owned by Microsoft and worked on only by Microsoft employees, Linux is owned by no one. When a problem arises with the way Linux works, it only gets fixed if someone, on his own, offers a good solution.”
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“Linux is clearly a decentralized system, since it has no formal organization and its contributors come from all over the world. What decentralization offers Linux is diversity.”
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“There’s enough variety among [Linux] programmers, and there are enough programmers, that no matter what the bug is, someone is going to come up with a fix for it. And there’s enough diversity that someone will recognize bugs when they appear.”
However, Surowiecki, treats the general idea of decentralisation in organisations with some scepticism calling it a “capacious term, and in the past few years it’s been tossed around more freely than ever”, and pointing out “Linux’s seeming wastefulness” which could be seen as “a kind of strength that for-profit companies cannot, fortunately or unfortunately cannot rely on”.
This is a healthy scepticism, since clearly there are many situations where decentralisation is the wrong approach. However, Surowiecki seems to miss the obvious ‘open goal’ in this chapter, which is that successful free and open source software projects don’t start as decentralised efforts. Linus Torvalds didn’t start the Linux Kernel with an empty text file and make a ‘call for contributions’, he wrote a working kernel on his own, and only after this original proof-of-concept was working did the community start contributing.
A similar pattern can be observed in many other FOSS projects, where a single individual or small group has worked intensively on a project, and then released the software once it has gained a degree of maturity. If the software is accepted and useful to the community, only then will a decentralised team emerge, and this takes significant time.
In this sense decentralisation could be considered as the ideal partner to an initial very intensive centralisation. On well-working decentralised projects, centralisation and decentralisation coexist in a fragile but powerful balance. As Surowiecki writes:
”[…] striking a balance between the local and the global is essential: a decentralized system can only produce genuinely intelligent results if there’s a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system”
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“Aggregation — which could be seen as a curious form of centralization — is therefore paradoxically important to the success of decentralization.”
Key questions for a project are therefore ‘when to decentralise?’ and ‘how much to centralise by?’. I suspect that these are not decisions that can be made, but rather that decentralisation ‘just happens’ when a project reaches a certain point, and if its creators allow. However, what is clear is that the utility and substance of the project (its centre) must be fully established before decentralisation can be meaningful.
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I didn't know this book but I will check it out. Another interesting book on a related subject is Pierre Levy's "Collective Intelligence". It's a philosophical book in the tradition of French 20th century thinking but it's striking how many of the predictions he makes is are reality today (it was written in 96).