6/14/2003 11:59:00 PM

daniel responds to some of my off-the-cuff musings on working groups by rightly pointing out that breakthroughs are often the genius of a single person. he uses the Semantic Web RDF/RSS situation to emphasize his point.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web he was an individual. Then the whole thing exploded and he helped create the W3C. Now he is trying to execute on the Semantic Web from within that institution, and it ain't gonna happen. It is only going to happen when a few of us lonely mavericks create applications that take the true idea, get through all the institutional diarrhea, and create something meaningful for real people.... Basically, bullshit is just bullshit as long as it's just laying around the pasture. It's when you take it and spread it over your crops that things get interesting.

my thoughts are pretty much in line with daniel's. i would add that breakthroughs (such as the WWW) are not paradigmatic, but catalyze a certain paradigm shifting. this was the effect of TBL's singular work on the W3. between shifts it is the work of committees, whether in the form of a W3C working group, the UN or the U.S. Senate, to guard, govern, extend and eventually burry the paradigm that authorizes it. the challenge is that this authorizing function of the world that the singular breakthrough opens can often never be burried and is defended by the authorized because of the identity and empowerment that their place in the world's unfolding provides. this is the cadence of the stereotypical behemoth beurocracy of design/creation/leadership-by-committee. often this state is only subverted through the whim of mass problem-solution adoption patterns (an example, in our present discussion, being RSS functionally dominating a space that a committee is trying to evolve and control). so, while i agree that the WWW was not originally invented by committee our experience of the web today rests not simply upon the work of the maverick, but upon the collective tensions of this work at the center of an economy of committees and world-wide adoption patterns--creating something much more than was originally envisioned in CERN not so many years ago.