Cathedral, Bazaar, and ... Wizards?

Check out this entry from Strategy + Business. It's an article by Nicholas Carr called The Ignorance of Crowds. It refers back to Eric Raymond's paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar where he talked about the use of distributed networks to help design and debug software like the Linux OS. Carr notes that after Raymond's article was published, everyone tried to get on board with the trend and apply the idea to a wide range of applications, from Wikipedia to shaping innovations into final products. I think the title of Carr's article is unfortunate because the real theme can be found in this paragraph:

If Raymond made a mistake in his paper, it was in drawing too sharp a distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar. They’re not two different and incompatible approaches to innovation. Their relationship is symbiotic. Without the cathedral, the bazaar model lacks focus and discipline.

A title more along these lines--accentuating the symbiosis--seems more accurate and more intriguing, although not as confrontational. I agree with the symbiosis conclusion and I also think that we're just beginning to understand how to use peer production. After millenniums of immersion in the cathedral/hierarchical system it may be just hard for us to wrap our minds around a different, counter-intuitive approach. I see the applications expanding over time.

But Carr makes another interesting observation. He indicates that every great idea has its source in some individual or small group of people--he calls them wizards and mages (wizard coined by Raymond in his paper). The role of the wizard is summarized here:

Matt Asay, a software executive with long experience in the open source movement, agrees. “All open source projects — without exception — are started by one or two people and…have a core development group of fewer than 15 developers,” he says. “The most you can hope for [from the broader set of contributors] is bug fixes.”

This may indeed be a law, but I think it's worth pushing. Maybe not in software development but in other areas where there is no single organization in charge. Health care is an example, where the establishment of standards is a task spread across dozens of organizations and even government intervention in a cathedral type of way is dicey. What we may wish to coax from these types of situations is an intermediate form along the continuum from cathedral to bazaar where pockets of wizards--some in cathedrals and others operating in more distributed-governance groups or independently--iterate the solution over time. It becomes a multiplayer game, whereas the creation of software like Linux is a "single player game" (or two player--man vs. code). Wizards take on the role of synthesis; bazaars can proliferate variety, conduct experiments and do rapid competitive sampling among various stakeholders; and cathedrals can manage the hard work of finishing products and managing the implementation and enforcement throughout their organizations.