The Wisdom of Communities is the theory that people can get much better advice, content, information, and wisdom by surveying multiple user-defined communities than they can get from “experts” or “crowds”.
Experts have a perspective problem: they have none other than their own. Crowds also have a perspective problem: they can only voice one perspective –- usually that of a dominant social group in the crowd. But communities have an enormous amount of perspectives and an enormous amount of voices with which to share them.
When leveraged with sufficiently robust technologies, this theory has the potential to spur a tremendous advance in communication. For the first time, we can look to relevant communities for better advice, content, information, and knowledge. For the first time, we can replace stereotypes and generalizations with real wisdom accessible by all.
But these technologies must first be built! Avanoo is the first… but we expect there will be many more!
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