How much guidance does the ‘hive mind’ need in order to produce something valuable? Kevin Kelly talks about bottom-up systems that produce content, such as Wikipedia, and how editorial roles, or general guiding design are required to make the best use of the swarm’s efforts. Its an interesting piece, and the concepts and ideas are well defined. I don’t have much faith in absolutes, so it makes sense to me that the optimal way to approach things is a combination of top down design and bottom up thinking/production.

Kevin Kelly: The Bottom is Not Enough

But throughout my boosterism I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.

The reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture.