View source for Bottom-up

A wiki is a good example of what '''bottom-up''' means.  A wiki is about bottom-up content and bottom-up ways to organise it.

Users produce content that seems relevant to them, linking it up themselves as they go along.  So a wiki emerges ''bottom-up'' and '''reflects the community who make and use it''', instead of being handed to them ''top-down'' by someone else.

===Useful===

This can be very handy
* it's an excellent way for people to pin down and share their own knowledge and information
* its connections reflect and share knowledge appropriate to the people sharing it
* it encourages digital (& real) community
* it encourages ownership, the development of expertise, better self-management etc
* it's not just a destination, it's a process by which a community builds knowledge

Most of all, bottom-up ways of doing things are very efficient compared to top-down ones.  It's how ninja-like natural things tend to operate.

===Dynamic links===

This particular wiki includes an extra type of link - a dynamic one that you can see in What's Popular, [[Related Pages]] and [[Personal Recommendations]].  These links are left by users as they click about.  This really ratchets up the bottom-up organisation part of what things like wiki's do.  It takes some of the emphasis off wiring links into content, increases the degrees of freedom, acts as an extra [[Artificial Intelligence|intelligent agent]] and helps to ''fluidise'' things.

This way
* content can find meaningful connections and places to be useful quicker
* it minimises [[Filter bubbles]] that slow down cross-fertilisation between people, subject areas etc
* the attention is automatically drawn to the interesting connections

Fluidising information is not about increasing randomness and hoping for interesting things to happen -
* these dynamic links directly reflect the thought processes of the users who create them, simply as they move about exploring things
* because these links are presented straight back to the users for more clicking, they form a direct feedback loop which can '''learn''' quickly

Overall, this helps the wiki to move along, better able to hit moving fuzzy knowledge and information targets, whereas super-complex and ultra high precision things sometimes just slow things down.

===So What===

Sharing [[Tacit Knowledge]] is often the magic ingredient for communities trying to do something together.  But it evaporates easily in normal information processing and delivery.  It may find its way back via top-down management or [[machine learning]] or incremental changes in taxonomy or design, but much of it is lost and/or mistimed.  With bottom-up stuff like dynamic links, on the other hand, you lose very little and take smaller, speedier and much simpler iterative steps.

You could view it as a form of [[Artificial Intelligence]] - after all it's doing a similar thing and even using similar [[Big Data|data]] to do it - but rather than make an intelligent agent to do the work for fools, the idea here is to help a community and the people in it explore things together more intelligently.

[[Category:Wiki]][[Category:School]][[Category:IT]][[Category:Science]]
Related Pages
Tacit Knowledge	Filter bubbles	Artificial Intelligence
Information diet	Collaborative filtering	Why I think a wiki would be good for the school
Related Pages	Monitoring the school's progress	Knowledge Management
Machine learning	Memex	There's never enough time!!