(2008-02-19) Kelly Bottomup Plus Topdown

Kevin Kelly thinks The Bottom-Up Hive Mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think.

At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add Design and Top Down control to get where we want to go.

The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer (P2P) generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions. Sturdy, robust foundations of User Generated Content and crowd-sourced Innovation (Crowd Sourcing) will feed very small slivers of Leadership agility... The real art of business and organizations in the Network Economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of "everybody" (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time.