Epistemic Communities
Discussion
How to deal with elite knowledge, without reverting to Elitism, Celebrity and Oligarchy:
Heather Marsh:
"While most action based systems can be completely open to participation by anyone, there are situations where an elite level of knowledge and accreditation of some sort is necessary prior to participation. Complicated surgery or engineering are examples of this type of work. While accreditation can and should come from the user group and be completely transparent and permeable, ability in many cases can only be reviewed by those who have attained an above average level of specialized knowledge. In these cases, there must be peer acknowledged levels of expertise attached to specific people, a situation not compatible with pure stigmergy or horizontal action.
Idea based systems such as some scientific research, which should be open to all contributions, require extensive feedback and peer review of ideas, both to identify signal from noise and to provide knowledge bridges between elite levels of knowledge and casual users. In many specialized systems such as the pharmaceutical industry, the entire user group has an urgent interest in ensuring that ideas are properly audited but few have the interest or ability to inform themselves to the level necessary to be able to audit. No one has the time to inform themselves to an expert level of knowledge in every system which affects them, even if that information is completely transparent and available to all. In these systems, ideas need to be promoted by those users qualified to understand them.
In these cases, it is necessary to define a form of elitism, of ideas or people, that will take advantage of expertise but not remove control of a system from the end users. Ignoring elite knowledge in favour of a pretense at completely horizontal governance will not eliminate elitism, it will only create hidden oligarchies dominated by those without the expertise required, usually celebrity personalities.
In allowing this form of elitism, ultimate choice must always be left with the entire user group. An epistemic community is a knowledge resource only; superior knowledge can only be forced to work for the wellbeing of the entire user group if authority remains with the entire user group and the epistemic community is forced to remain completely transparent and permeable. Science may dream of brilliant innovations, but the user group controls whether those are implemented or created. This authority also provides the incentive for transparency and knowledge bridges to explain reasoning to the entire group.
As in stigmergy, votes in a concentric group are frequently replaced by actions, as expert review will show the options most likely to bring the best results. This information is then available to all and those options will, barring outside factors, be accepted as best practices by most of the user group. The celebrated hive mind behind recent actions has never actually existed in practice; the hive takes actions but ideas originate with individuals. On every occasion depicted as a mass hive action there has been epistemic community or solitary planning creating a butterfly effect. Even when these planning groups are theoretically open to all, they are in actuality only open to those with knowledge of them. Acknowledging epistemic communities does not create them, it simply brings them into the open and allows any member of the user group to participate.
An epistemic community can be people or ideas, depending on the situation. While credit for ideas must always be given, idea based systems should probably promote ideas instead of people, a body of laws instead of a judiciary. While action in a specialized action based system can only be taken by those qualified, meaningful input can come from a broad section of the user group and be evaluated and promoted by those qualified. Promoting ideas also allows auditing of an idea without all the unrelated distraction of attached personalities.
In such a system it is absolutely essential that global communication be recognized as a first basic right of all people, as communication is power to obtain all the rights which follow and the method to claim membership in society." (http://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/concentric-groups-knowledge-bridges-and-epistemic-communities-2/)
More Information
- article series, : ‘Stigmergy: Systems of Mass Collaboration’. [1]