You can have a amateur photographer who chooses to photograph wild orchids for 30 years and all of a sudden he is an ‘expert’ on orchids. Other professional ‘experts’, of 30 years standing, get together and they can’t agree on a founding principle.

No closed groups some sort of Consensus Polling is required.

I think there is a place for both the ‘expert’, and the public. A little like Arthur and his round table. But it is one that forms as quickly as it dissolves, over time and space (as the time-space continuum Giddens’ describes in structuration theory).

I agree with Larry and your concern, but have doubts about larry’s solution Citizendium, which wants to put the experts ‘back in charge’. I believe we have to repurpose the role of the experts. The modern paradigm sees us a disconnected individuals, which are centrally addressed by institutions, and with the rule of the experts which validate truth. I think the new paradigm is about connected individuals and peer groups, which co-inform themselves and act more autonomously, and need to engage with a support infrastructure, and this is where the experts play a role.

In peer production, putting the experts in charge, can, and does often have, a crowding out effect, and this is what I fear will happen with the Citizendium project. My view is that, no matter how expert the doctor, in the end, it is the patient who has to choose the treatment; no matter how expert the ecological engineer, it is the citizen that makes the political decisions. So how can we optimize the decision-making by involving experts?

For wikipedia, my idea is that next to the pages produced by any users, special pages would be opened up to experts only, where they could point out the mistakes or omissions on the pages for examples.

In politics, we can have public debates where experts play a privileged role in informing the public.

In health, see the Open Health report of the UK Design Council, we can have healthcare reorganized as a support infrastructure, instead of as a industrial process where the patient is just a number.

But at the same time I also think that there is a certain downside to the successes of open systems, collaborative software and highly participative networks that we are witnessing today. It is a breakdown of respect for expertise. It comes as a result of the empowerment that Web 2.0 brings…and because we now know that the knowledge we produce can be as important as those produced by a few professionals in the older days, there is a radical breakdown in how we view professionals.

I think this because I work daily with a group of librarians and museum curators who increasingly, find it challenging to search for appropriate vocabulary to describe the work they do and their value-add in the contemporary context.

I was very glad to read an article by Larry Sanger recently, who assured me that I’m not the only one feeling this way. Will share more about this in a separate post.