Today, I was watching a YouTube video called “There is something faster than light?“ and felt inspired to reflect on system design. The connection is not a technical one, but conceptual. What caught my attention was the notion of locality and non-locality and a more general question of how influence and causality propagate in physical systems.
In Newtonian gravity, gravitational interaction is effectively non-local: changes in mass distributions are reflected instantaneously, with no propagation delay, implying action at a distance. Einstein’s theory of relativity replaces this picture with a local one. Gravity is no longer an instantaneous force, but a manifestation of spacetime curvature, where changes propagate at the speed of light. As a result, gravitational influence spreads causally and locally from one region of spacetime to another.
What does it mean to system design? The law of nature is a given system. We can‘t change it, we study it. The systems within organisations however are designed by human beings, thus changeable. In our analogy, a non-local system design means that each individual within the organisation receives the information with equal speed and they all follow the rule as desired by the system. In a local system design, each person receives the information in sequence and with some sorts of delay, e.g. due to hierarchy in the organisation.
In terms of system design, there are two interesting questions for me:
- If the information is received by all the people at the same time, how can we make sure that their actions are desired ones?
- If the information are distributed to people with different speed in sequence, how can we minimise the distortions and still reach the desired action and outcome?
To appropriately answer those questions above, one fundamental assumption needs to be made: Does the crowd always make a better decision or should we establish some kinds of groups of experts for better decision making, i.e. excluding some people from decision making? I have a clear view on it.
“If we design a system in which individuals make their local optimal decisions, then the sum of benefits from those is bigger than searching for a complex global, non-local maximum. Excluding people from decision making means reducing the diversity of perspectives in the first place. We should rather focus on aggregating those views than select the right people for decision making.“
This is why I call this blog crowd minds to think about systems that can aggregate the individual innovations to reach the optimum. As a IT-professional, it translates to designing a digital platform and a digital system to leverage decentralised decision making, also referred to crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing is an intriguing idea. However, as I mentioned in my first post about “Change Through Technology“, it matters a lot which objectives do we follow with crowdsourcing. My objective is to create a digital system to maximise the freedom of individuals to innovate, i.e. to create a virtuous cycle, reaching a better result for everyone, with the contributions of everyone.
You want to know more about the term “Crowdsourcing“? I generated a video about crowdsourcing using Notebooklm based on publicly available sources on this topic. It may contain biases and is incomplete due to my selection of sources. It should solely be used as a complementary material for understanding the term crowdsourcing better. Take a look and have fun :).
Crowd Minds 
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