Images source: Peer to Patent
A month ago, I heard Beth Novack from the New York Law School give a talk at the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. She is working on an interesting project called the Peer to Patent project, which is trying to incorporate peer review into the patent review process. She pointed to a (then) recent blog post by Adam Oram, on O’Reilly Radar:
“The idea of micro-elites actually came to me when looking at the Peer to Patent project. There are currently 1611 signed-up contributors searching for prior art on patent applications. But you don’t want 1611 people examining each patent. You want the 20 people who understand the subject deeply and intimately. A different 20 people on each patent adds up to 1611 (and hopefully the project will continue, and grow to a hundred or a thousands times that number).”
The concept of the micro-elite is interesting because it has characteristics of both a zero-sum and a non-zero-sum game. In that, anyone can in theory become a micro-elite, by picking a sub-genre (or perhaps sub-sub-genre) and broadening your knowledge base. Picking something obscure helps achieve micro-elite status. The problem appears if you want to become a micro-elite on a popular subject. Then, being one of the select few becomes more much difficult. Oram also mentions that this project also requires someone to have to go out and persuade the 20 experts to help out. However, what happens when you have too many equally skilled people who want to be involved? The term micro-elites by definition set a finite number of participants. The idea of crowd sourcing, if you will, the patent review process is a very interesting one. Peer to Patent is just starting out. I’ll be curious to see how it scales, how the collaborative efforts can grow, and if there is competition for participation in general or for specific cases occurs.
