Kent Beck, et. al.
“Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” (Beck et. al., “The Agile Manifesto,” 2001).
Eric Raymond
“Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
Clay Shirky
“Most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.” (Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody,” 2008)
Citing Ronald Coase, Shirky notes that the transaction costs (particular the costs of formalizing communications and activities as well as discovering/recognizing assets) usually associated with organizing and managing many small and diverse operations, were so high as to limit their development to small insignificant tasks that would not affect institutional decision-making, and would . “Now that it is possible to achieve large scale coordination at low cost, a third category has emerged: serious, complex work, taken on without institutional direction. (Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody,” 2008)
James Surowiecki
Surowiecki points to the decentralization of the intelligence community, and the negatives involved in the difficulty of sharing information, cited as one factor in the failure of the intelligence community to predict and prevent the 9/11 attacks. The problem, however, was not decentralization, but decentralization with no way to aggregate the results into something useful. (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)
“The idea of the wisdom of crowds also takes decentralization as a given and a good, since it implies that if you set a crowd of self-interested, independent people working in a decentralized way on the same problem, instead of trying to direct their efforts from the top-down, their collective solution is likely to be better than any other solution you could come up with.” (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)
“Technology is now making global collaboration not just possible but easy and productive. And the value of working not only across universities but nations is clearly immense, while limited yourself to the skill set found in your immediate department or working-group seems self defeating.” (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)
The “best” solutions are not selected by popular vote, but by who is responsible for taking the results of the decentralized development process, and aggregating them into something useful by selecting the ‘best’ bits and pieces. (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)
Opening My Masters 