Bottom-up
A wiki is a good example of what bottom-up means. A wiki is about bottom-up content and bottom-up ways to organise it.
Users produce content that seems relevant to them, linking it up themselves as they go along. So a wiki emerges bottom-up and reflects the community who make and use it, instead of being handed to them top-down by someone else.
Useful
This can be very handy
- it's an excellent way for people to pin down and share their own knowledge and information
- its connections reflect and share knowledge appropriate to the people sharing it
- it encourages digital (& real) community
- it encourages ownership, the development of expertise, better self-management etc
- it's not just a destination, it's a process by which a community builds knowledge
Most of all, bottom-up ways of doing things are very efficient compared to top-down ones. It's how ninja-like natural things tend to operate.
Dynamic links
This particular wiki includes an extra type of link - a dynamic one that you can see in What's Popular, Related Pages and Personal Recommendations. These links are left by users as they click about. This really ratchets up the bottom-up organisation part of what things like wiki's do. It takes some of the emphasis off wiring links into content, increases the degrees of freedom, acts as an extra intelligent agent and helps to fluidise things.
This way
- content can find meaningful connections and places to be useful quicker
- it minimises Filter bubbles that slow down cross-fertilisation between people, subject areas etc
- the attention is automatically drawn to the interesting connections
Fluidising information is not about increasing randomness and hoping for interesting things to happen -
- these dynamic links directly reflect the thought processes of the users who create them, simply as they move about exploring things
- because these links are presented straight back to the users for more clicking, they form a direct feedback loop which can learn quickly
Overall, this helps the wiki to move along, better able to hit moving fuzzy knowledge and information targets, whereas super-complex and ultra high precision things sometimes just slow things down.
So What
Sharing Tacit Knowledge is often the magic ingredient for communities trying to do something together. But it evaporates easily in normal information processing and delivery. It may find its way back via top-down management or machine learning or incremental changes in taxonomy or design, but much of it is lost and/or mistimed. With bottom-up stuff like dynamic links, on the other hand, you lose very little and take smaller, speedier and much simpler iterative steps.
You could view it as a form of Artificial Intelligence - after all it's doing a similar thing and even using similar data to do it - but rather than make an intelligent agent to do the work for fools, the idea here is to help a community and the people in it explore things together more intelligently.
