Steven Levy Quotes

Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.

I'm interested in harnessing the good will and distributed power of people, including novices.

When you think of Napster, you think of music. But the first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but for the whole Internet.

In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.

That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle.

The free sharing and teaching of open source is incompatible with the notion of the solitary genius.

There is power in creating a small model, and then you can create an alliance of other small models.

You can get really far by putting your ideas out there and letting other people build on them.

I'm an investor in MakerBot, which is a good example of the 'thingiverse'. The idea of applying collaboration and rapid iteration to things that we interact with and hold in our hands every day is super revolutionary.

Social innovation thrives on collaboration; on doing things with others, rather than just to them or for them: hence the great interest in new ways of using the web to 'crowdsource' ideas, or the many experiments involving users in designing services.

The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result.

As I've conducted my interviews with crowdsourcing entrepreneurs and experts, it's constantly hit me that your ability to do something big and bold is really a function of the size and quality of your crowd.

There is a book yearning to come out of me: about how we can build the new collaboration economy, and the role of 'openness' in our quest for efficient use of resources and as a driver of innovation.

I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.

Wikipedia is kind of extreme, where a very, very small group of people contribute pretty much everything.

Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use - not only text or media but processing power too - will be located remotely.

It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world.

I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.

My personal fascination with the power of the crowd has been growing: Exactly what can a 'crowd' accomplish? We know crowds can raise billions of dollars, create Wikipedia, and even design and build small autonomous drones. But how about something large and complex like designing a new car, and maybe someday even a spaceship?

Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.

In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.

I have a very difficult time getting the Napster world.

If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.

To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows.