Weblog
Jul 29, 05:37 am: Quality isn't a pie
One of the questions framing BlogHerCon is Play by today’s rules—or change the game? There is a list of questions for the debate and many of them have to do with lists and recognition. I’m reading that with the backdrop of two excellent posts by Shelley Powers, When We are Needed and Follow-up to When We are Needed. Some of the comments, on her posts and elsewhere, hone in on this question from Shelley:
Some would say that we need to make women more competitive, but I don’t think that’s the answer because I don’t think we’re asking the right question. The real question is: do we women want to compete more, or do we want to get men to compete less?
There is often a link between competition and quality. That is: we find out who is the best through competition and competition keeps us trying.
But.
What if competition isn’t the only route to quality. Instead, what if competition favors people who have won before and so leave some paths to quality unused?
Well, then we need to think of other paths to quality. There are all these systems generating buzz —open source, creative commons, drupal, opml—that have collaboration and sharing baked into them. That is, collaboration is the path to quality. Hell, isn’t that what the whole wisdom of the crowds stuff is about?
And what if building tools to measure collaboration—and I have no idea what those tools or measurements are—helps us to be more inclusive? And what if that collaboration and inclusivity leads to, not just a higher degree of quality, but more quality?
I’m not sure that I’ve figured out what I’m trying to say here. I feel like I’m practicing. Writing aloud so that, like peeling an onion, I can eventually get at the core of what I think. But here’s the real thing. Or, anyway, the real thing for me.
The reason APIs and weblogs and podcasting and syndication get my motor running is because they start to allow us to collaborate. But as long as we are measuring our success in those areas by lists and authority, as long as we are linking to people who are like us, well, then we aren’t really collaborating are we? I mean, real collaboration is hard. It means taking in ideas that are different from our own and changing as a result.
It means figuring out how to build a big damn tent.
And that doesn’t mean sacrificing quality. Quality isn’t a pie. It can be unlimited and that, it seems, is what we should be working toward.
