The power of collective wisdom

There was a great example of collective wisdom given at the Impact99 Conference a few days ago at Quest. It talked about the fact that 100 million collective hours has created wikipedia. And the speaker speculated on what we could accomplish with 100 billions hours of accumulated and shared wisdom...perhaps a cure to cancer? 


Another great example of this is the recent announcement that gamers had solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade.

After scientists repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, they called in Foldit players, an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules.The scientists challenged the gamers to produce an accurate model of the enzyme. They did it in only three weeks.


This made me reflect on the interesting online dialogue that is happening around the municipal election in Squamish. The debate and discussion is awesome, and is hopefully the start of something ongoing, because this type of participation should happen continuously. Not just at election time.


Here's to changing that in the future.