Future of Innovation will be driven bottom-up by Communities, not top-down by Governments or Corporations

Can a group of enthusiasts, who never met each other, located in different parts of the world (different continents, timezones) come together, collaborate and solve big problems of the society?

This is a question that intrigued me and I thought of starting Omdena to see if such a bottom-up model can work.

Despite all of the challenges, there was one thing all the enthusiast had in common. They all were immensely motivated and had the desire to build a real-world product that solves a real-world problem.

What happened in the past six months is amazing. Not only over 400 enthusiasts from 63 countries collaborated to work on major social challenges like fighting hunger in Nepal, conflicts in Somalia, forest fire in Brazil, sexual harassment in India, but they were also able to build very sophisticated AI models and at the same time help each other. The more experienced developers started sharing their work and helping the not so experienced developers, and the ones who are new started to generate data.

Collaboration and not Competition

This is a new model of innovation. A model where communities can come together to solve their problems, share their data and build solutions.

In the world of Big data and Machine Learning, data is the key. It is not a sophisticated algorithm or better team, but it’s the team with the better (and more) data that wins. The second thing that happened was that due to the flood of online courses, education, especially of emerging technologies like AI and ML, became easily accessible. Now, for anyone in any part of the world, it is very easy to start learning from websites like Udemy, Coursera. Looking back even 10–15 years ago, when I was a student I did not have that access to all this knowledge. Now, one does not have to go to MIT or Stanford or Cambridge, to get top class education. The third thing that has happened is that a lot of people are making their code open source. Thus anyone can take up open source code, and start adapting to their needs.

So below are the steps to follow for anyone who is interested in the community-driven approach:

1. Build a community of highly motivated people who have a common vision, motivation and mission. The community should have a diverse set of experiences and skills.
2. Bring them under a platform, can be slack.
3. Follow best practices, processes, and tools for collaborative work.
4. Hold regular events where the community members can showcase their work and share knowledge.
5. Write about the work they are doing to keep the motivation up. Everyone likes recognition.

Managing the community

Communities are quite difficult to manage and maintain. The best strategy is to speak in a language with common values and motivations. This is the only way to build a “tribe”[1]: a group of people who have a shared sense of meaning and connection.

Another thing that is important is someone who can glue the community together. In his book, ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big’, Scott Adams talked about building diverse skills, so that whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Another skill I am trying to improve is my communication skills. The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once said that ‘observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence’. While working with students, observing without evaluating comes in handy.

Value out of the community

Solutions built by communities are almost guaranteed to be adopted. They know what problems to solve, how to get the data, and even how to build those solutions. What they need is support, mentoring and encouragement.

A community creates empowerment, builds trust, gives access to data, generates diverse opinions, and spurs innovation.

But what happens if the created model generates economic value? How is that distributed especially where a company outsources its project to the community? The data and the code remain with the community while the trained model is being used by the company. So if there is economic value, it makes more sense for both the community as well the company to benefit from the output.

The company’s interests are for the short term. The community’s interests are for the long term.

This approach of using the community can be even bigger. While watching a documentary on some oppressive regimes, I realize that the goal of an oppressive regime (or corporation) is to control people. This is a classical top-down approach where some elites tell rest of us what to do when to do.

A community-driven approach is just the opposite. It is not about control but about spurring free ideas. This is what drives true innovation and this is the place I believe the world should go and I want to be part of.

“When we are in contact with our own feelings and needs, then we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings” — Non-Violent Communication: A language of life by Marshall Rosenberg.