Robert Laubacher

The dawn of the E-lance economy

Will the large industrial corporation dominate the twenty-first century as it did the twentieth? Maybe not. Drawing on their research at MITs Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher postulate a world in which business is not controlled through a stable chain of management in a large, permanent company. Rather, it is carried out autonomously by independent contractors connected through personal computers and electronic networks. These electronically connected free-lancers-e-lancers-would join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done--after a day, a month, a year--the network would dissolve and its members would again become independent agents. Far from being a wild hypothesis, the e-lance economy is, in many ways, already upon us. We see it in the rise of outsourcing and telecommuting, in the increasing importance within corporations of ad-hoc project teams, and in the evolution of the Internet. Most of the necessary building blocks of this type of business organization--efficient networks, data interchange standards, groupware, electronic currency, venture capital micromarkets--are either in place or under development. What is lagging behind is our imagination. But, the authors contend, it is important to consider sooner rather than later the profound implications of how such an e-lance economy might work. They examine the opportunities, and the problems, that may arise and anticipate how the role of managers may change fundamentally--or possibly even disappear altogether.

Social capital increases efficiency of collaboration among Wikipedia editors

In this study we measure the impact of pre-existing social capital on the efficiency of collaboration among Wikipedia editors. To construct a social network among Wikipedians we look to mutual interaction on the user talk pages of Wikipedia editors. As our data set, we analyze the communication networks associated with 3085 featured articles - the articles of highest quality in the English Wikipedia, comparing it to the networks of 80154 articles of lower quality. As the metric to assess the quality of collaboration, we measure the time of quality promotion from when an article is started until it is promoted to featured article. The study finds that the higher pre-existing social capital of editors working on an article is, the faster the articles they work on reach higher quality status, such as featured articles. The more cohesive and more centralized the collaboration network, and the more network members were already collaborating before starting to work together on an article, the faster the article they work on will be promoted or featured.

Enhancing product development through knowledge‐based engineering (KBE)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show with figures the potentialities of knowledge‐based engineering (KBE) methods in new product development (NPD). It estimates the business value generated by a tool which integrates the handoff between engineering groups of a large aerospace company.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on three years of observation and interviews at a leading Italian firm. A process‐based approach is used for assessing business value.Findings – The KBE application automated the preparation of data transferred to computer‐aided engineering engineers for analysis by computer‐aided design engineers and reduced the time required by more than 90 percent. This allowed time savings which contributed to enhance product quality.Research limitations/implications – The paper is based on a single case, though its findings are consistent with prior studies. Future research will implement like applications in other contexts at the subject firm and other firms.Practical implicatio...

Sensible Organizations: Changing Our Businesses and Work Styles through Sensor Data

We introduce the concept of sensor-based applications for the daily business settings of organizations and their individual workers. Wearable sensor devices were developed and deployed in a real organization, a bank, for a month in order to study the effectiveness and potential of using sensors at the organizational level. It was found that patterns of physical interaction changed dynamically while e-mail is more stable from day to day. Different patterns of behavior between people in different rooms and teams (p < 0.01), as well as correlations between communication and a workers subjective productivity, were also identified. By analyzing a fluctuation of network parameters, i.e., “betweenness centrality, ” it was also found that communication patterns of people are different: some people tend to communicate with the same people in regular frequency (which is hypothesized as a typical pattern of throughput-oriented jobs) while some others drastically changed their communication day by day (which is hypothesized as a pattern of creative jobs). Based on these hypotheses, a reorganization, such that people having similar characteristics work together, was proposed and implemented.

The Climate CoLab: Large scale model-based collaborative planning

The Climate CoLab is a system to help thousands of people around the world collectively develop plans for what humans should do about global climate change. This paper shows how the system combines three design elements (model-based planning, on-line debates, and electronic voting) in a synergistic way. The paper also reports early usage experience showing that: (a) the system is attracting a continuing stream of new and returning visitors from all over the world, and (b) the nascent community can use the platform to generate interesting and high quality plans to address climate change. These initial results indicate significant progress towards an important goal in developing a collective intelligence system—the formation of a large and diverse community collectively engaged in solving a single problem.

Studying Microscopic Peer-to-Peer Communication Patterns

This paper describes first results of an ongoing research effort using real time data collected by social badges to correlate temporal changes in social interaction patterns with performance of individual actors and groups. Towards that goal we analyzed social interaction among a team of employees at a bank in Germany, and developed a set of interventions for more efficient collaboration. In particular, we were able to identify typical meeting patterns, and to distinguish between creative and high-executing knowledge work based on the interaction pattern.

Solving Wicked Social Problems with Socio-computational Systems

Global climate change is one of the most challenging problems humanity has ever faced. Fortunately, a new way of solving large, complex problems has become possible in just the last decade or so. Examples like Wikipedia and Linux illustrate how the work of thousands of people can be combined in ways that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Inspired by systems like these, we developed the Climate CoLab—a global, on-line platform in which thousands of people around the world work together to create, analyze, and ultimately select detailed plans for what we humans can do about global climate change.The Climate CoLab has been operating since November 2009, and has an active community of thousands of users. In this article, we outline some of the challenges faced in developing the system, describe our current solutions to these problems, and report on our experiences.

Putting the Pieces Back Together Again: Contest Webs for Large-Scale Problem Solving

A key issue, whenever people work together to solve a complex problem, is how to divide the problem into parts done by different people and combine the parts into a solution for the whole problem. This paper presents a novel way of doing this with groups of contests called contest webs. Based on the analogy of supply chains for physical products, the method provides incentives for people to (a) reuse work done by themselves and others, (b) simultaneously explore multiple ways of combining interchangeable parts, and (c) work on parts of the problem where they can contribute the most. The paper also describes a field test of this method in an online community of over 50,000 people who are developing proposals for what to do about global climate change. The early results suggest that the method can, indeed, work at scale as intended.