Balancing Top-Down and Bottom-Up: The Example of Editors

Kevin Kelly has a great take on balancing top-down and bottom-up structures, and he gives editors as an example.

Kelly is a big proponent of bottom-up systems: smart mobs, hive mind, web 2.0, things like that. But he sees an important role for editors to make that work.

He gives the surprising example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not all bottom-up. There is a top-down system for creating the structure. There is a center to look to the future. There are a few people empowered to make editing and community decisions.

And this little bit of top-down is essential to Wikipedia’s success.

Kelly writes:

It’s taken a while but I think we’ve learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don’t need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.

I appreciate his pragmatism here, which I find much more trustworthy that the ideological purity of decentralization I found in We Are Everywhere.

Now the tough work begins: how to find that balance in different settings.

(Thanks to the Nonprofit Online News for tipping us off on this)