The Wisdom Economy

The second meeting wasn't exactly two weeks later... But on April 22, 2007 the EES met to talk about something we lumped under the label of the "Wisdom Economy" (though that term doesn't speak very well to the algorithmic angle we were focusing on). These were the readings for the meeting:

TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/masum/
2002, Hassan Masum

Shared opinions drive society: what we read, how we vote, and where we shop are all heavily influenced by the choices of others. However, the cost in time and money to systematically share opinions remains high, while the actual performance history of opinion generators is often not tracked. This article explores the development of a distributed open opinion layer, which is given the generic name of TOOL. Similar to the evolution of network protocols as an underlying layer for many computational tasks, we suggest that TOOL has the potential to become a common substrate upon which many scientific, commercial, and social activities will be based. Valuation decisions are ubiquitous in human interaction and thought itself. Incorporating information valuation into a computational layer will be as significant a step forward as our current communication and information retrieval layers.

Automated Collaborative Filtering and Semantic Transports
http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/articles/ACF.html
1997, Alexander Chislenko

This essay focuses on the conceptualization of the issues, comparisons of current technological developments to other historical/evolutionary processes, future of automated collaboration and its implications for economic and social development of the world, and suggestions of what we may want to pursue and avoid. Explanations of the workings of the technology and analysis of the current market are not my purpose here, although some explanations and examples may be appropriate.