On the Power of Crowd-Sourcing.

Or Why You Will Never Make In On Your Own.

So anyway, I’ve been sitting on this idea of electricity-monitoring for about 10 years now, and thought I had it all figured out…

… and a conversation turned up on the open-manufacturing list recently which led to the Internet 0 thing, which is now 5 years old and appears not to have set the world on fire, or at least not yet.

And I always thought that the killer-app for electricity-monitoring would be being able to control your house from the web. This would be the bribe that would get it through the door – and I missed completely the REAL killer-app, which is that with wified home-automation, you don’t need to have wired-in light-switches – which radically reduces the amount of building effort/cost/expertise etc. The driver isn’t novelty-seeking consumerism, it’s the building trade.

Ten years of thinking about this, and I missed what someone with a different perspective saw immediately. This is why crowd-sourced imagination is a killer-app at a higher level. It doesn’t matter if you’re Einstein or Newton or Da-Vinci… you simply cannot compete with imagination coming from a multiplicity of different perspectives.

How does the saying go? 1 point of perspective is worth 80 points of IQ?

Crowd-sourcing doesn’t work for everything, but it’s very good for perspective… and therefore very good for imagination.