The trick to building smart software can be counter-intuitive. It requires that you have the utmost respect for human intelligence NOT software intelligence. Look at wikipedia as an example. Smart software right? Well not quite.

Wikipedia is a great example of a small group of smart humans piloting a massive group of humans using software. “All these people, thousands of people, there must be no rules! But there is a very ornate and well-defined structure of participation.”, link. It doesn’t work because of machine intelligence, it works because of human intelligence. The same applies to highly successful foss projects such as bsd, ubuntu, etc:

“The FreeBSD Core Team is the nine-member elected management body of the FreeBSD Project”, link.

As a designer/developer, you can’t get lost in technological hubris. You must respect and leverage human intelligence. Failing to do so will lead you into the dark sad corner. Actually it’s a busy corner so you’ll meet a lot of similar minded folks, which could be nice?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.