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.

New York Times reportor, Lisa Belkin, tries to justify “wasted time” at work in her Life’s Work column.

She cites a study by Microsoft on productivity in the workplace. Microsoft found that out of the average 45 hour work week, 16 of those hours were “wasted.” The biggest culprit was useless meetings, with respondents saying that they spend more then 5 hours a week in meetings and 71% of them are “not productive.”

I love the quote from “personal development expert” Steve Pavlina who says, “the average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m., and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.” He also goes on to mention that employees work an average of 1.5 hours a day.

Being unproductive today is much easier than past working generations. Here we see true signs of technical progress. How did people waste time at the office before web surfing, IM,  email, mobile phones and desktop computers? How unproductive can really by making personal calls and talking by the water cooler?

Our plenitude of slacking options may not end up being something celebrated or cherished forever. In that, Belkin closes by citing a growing trend of ROWE, or Results Only Work Environment. The oft cited example is Best Buy’s move to allow corporate employees to set their own schedules. As long as work get done and goal are met, mid-day movies and downtown brunches are all fine. She notes that “output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.”

ROWE is definitely a trend to track; however, I’m not convinced it’s the savior for worker. If it does spread, it will accelerate our distributed work lives, where work life and personal life blend into one. With ROWE, will we be freed from our artbitary office hours, or will we be checking work at 1 am? Will ROWE be liberate us from the office, or permanmently force us to take our office wherever we go?