This is a Gothic Cathedral, actually it is Milan's Duomo, big isn't it. The original Gothic Cathedrals were built in the 12th century and they are amazing feats of technology for that period. These massive structures were constructed without any significant mechanisation. You might wonder how it was acheived and the answer is similar to that of the pyramids. They were community efforts. Although there were paid artisans working on these projects they would not have been completed with large amounts of voluntary labour by the wider community.

Now skip forward to the present day and you may think that this sense of community endeavour has gone out the window. This is not so however, it has meerly changed its form. The public are still willing to band together on a voluntary basis to assist projects as long as they meet certain clear criteria.

Yochai Benkler, an expert on information and intellectual property at Yale Law School, Connecticut believes that if a project is viewed and being "for the public good" and there is no clear beneficiary other than the public then there is no shortage of willing helpers, even in todays cynical society. He sites Project Gutenberg, which is creating an ever-growing, searchable online library of copyright-free books. So far 12,000 books have been scanned, OCR'd and proof read by volunteers who receive no recognition or reward other than knowing that they are contributing to society.

There is immense power in community and others are looking at how they can harness it. Scientific endeavours have over recent years become increasingly marginalised from the mainstream community. Scientists work seeming to be so specialised that only fellow specialists are capable of contributing. New research however is showing that the "collective consciousness" is proving to be as powerful, if not more so, than individual thought of these specialists. NASA instigated a project called Clickworkers in which volunteers were given a small amount of training then ask to classify craters that were identified on photos from Mars.

NASA found that

the automatically computed consensus of a large number of clickworkers is virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters

or, to put it another way, the collective opinion of a large number of amateurs was just as good as that of an expert. Now other scientific organisations are looking at how they can utilise this phenonemon to their advantage.

Interestingly this is arising out of the America where the general assumption is that the almighty dollar rules. It seems that even in this highly comercial environment "community good" is still a powerful force.

If you would like to read more on this phenonemon then on the right is a link to a book called The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki. You can also read more in Nature.