The Wisdom of Crowds (Beta Version)

May offered teams additional points for fleshing out a business model and a plan--but participation is still sporadic. "No one is stepping up to drive this thing," he says. Part of the reason may be the self-editing wiki software the teams use for communications, which isn't intuitive for most people yet. But there simply may be limits to the appeal of virtual participation--or really, of organizational democracy. "One of the biggest problems is silence," says TBE member Sean Clauson. Unless someone has a radical idea, or strongly opposes an idea, there's little discussion one way or the other. "In traditional organizations, you get a raised eyebrow or a nod of the head to tell you how an idea is going over. Here, we're in a world without feedback." Lacking cues to act on, the crowd falls into complacent groupthink.

Indeed, TBE yielded a telling result recently when May polled stakeholders about "microchunking," breaking down the project into small, discrete tasks and allowing contributors to take on only what they were good at. A cascade of comments followed--providing opinions on implementing the business--but no initial offers to actually do the work. The response revealed both the promise and the elusiveness of P2P: The crowd may be wise, but it's worthless if it won't act.