Mike Dearing

Ebay

During the interlude, Mike Dearing gave some thoughts on the emerging themes of the conference.

Negative effects of infectious action was clearly a prominent topic, and he suggested that there are three ways to deal with this: rules (which miust be enforced), pricing (make bad behavior expensive) or sunshine. This last solution is interesting, in that it simply consists of exposing the misbehavior, making it public. Often this is sufficient to prevent people from engaging in it… although of course I can see this backfiring if people are proud of their antisocial behavior (ie. trolls)

In response to a question during Peter’s talk as to whether Wikipedia was truly infectious action as such a small percentage of users contribute to it, Mike pointed out that concentration in production is okay. As long as all users have the option to participate, it makes the system feel more democratic. He also agreed with Peter that the concept of human bandwidth is a really big deal.

Favorite quote:

Never forget that capital is heartless, impatient and optimistic