Digg + SSRN + Consulting Firms + Foundations

It’s unusual for me to imagine how different life was five years ago. Five years ago, I was a freshman, without a clue on how to write a research paper or conduct a literature review. And although five years have passed, I still think there are many parts of the research process that are still very inefficient. While researching my honors thesis, I mainly used Google Scholar, EBSCO, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and a random haphazard amalgamation of articles that I tried to save over the years (file tubs left over from the debate years filled with articles was a really inefficient system). Only now that I’ve been out of school and have seen how others approach scholarly writing do I realize that journals and individuals are particularly good sources of information. I keep issues of the Stanford Social Innovation Review and read them cover to cover and try to stay up to date on particular individuals I have found insightful, mainly through Google Reader if they have a blog (I still need to track down Jed Emerson’s work and a few others – I think I might add a static page to this blog with some of the most interesting articles I’ve liked).

But part of the problem of academia and publishing in general is that there is a disconnect between those that are well-published and those that have good ideas. I’m not sure if the journal peer-review process is blind to authors’ names, but it seems to me that there exists a perverse incentive to publish and cite individuals based on how famous they are and not necessarily on the merit of their ideas. After all, the more famous people you publish in your journal and cite in your paper, the more legitimate your journal or paper seems.

In the philanthropic world, research is extremely disconnected and the bigger players generally have the bigger voice, despite what the smaller players say. Truth be told, there is a correlation between size and quality; generally, the larger foundations publish more insightful works. But this becomes a problem for the smaller players who actually have something meaningful to say: because of the signal-to-noise ratio, it becomes very difficult for the smaller players to say anything. Furthermore, foundations don’t seem to cite other reports as much when compared to the academic literature.

Digg, when it first started, was actually funded by the Omidyar Foundation through a mission investment, partially because it had a mission of “democratizing” the Internet. Rather than having all the publishing houses have all the control, they could have users, who rated articles up or down, determine the merit of articles. So in thinking about how difficult research is in the foundation world and more generally, I was inspired by Lucy’s post of “pitching Hollywood” about an idea to make research reports in the foundation world rated by the philanthropic community, so that the good reports would bubble up and the not as good reports would bubble down. Ideally, this would make the marketplace of ideas (hat tip to John Stuart Mill) more efficient and bring more voices to the table than had previously existed. Ideally, this would also reduce the perverse incentive that exists for consulting firms to write long papers that no one wants to read through for the purpose of increasing billable hours, since there would be a different metric (number of diggs) that could be used instead.

Lots of ideas here, not enough visuals. I promise, in the next few posts I’ll put up some screenshots/diagrams for some of the ideas presented so far.