The universe has not let me down: I've had a "true" third encounter with the prisoner's dilemma, letting that second person mentioned in my previous blog post off the hook.

Stefano Mazzocchi has posted Nash Equilibria in Non-Cooperative Data Modeling. I'm finding it a fascinating post, akin to some other ideas I've had and will post soon. (Though Stefano is much further advanced in his thinking than I!) I strongly recommend you take a few minutes and check it out.

PowerPoint decks, despite being the vehicle of truth in many corporations, have failed to convey the value of cooperation in building knowledge domains. Stefano mentions his frustration with efforts to bootstrap the surfacing of data. Now, I am a huge fan of the work done by the Simile Project, Protege, and many other academic and commercial groups - I've made great use of many of these tools. But I am passionate about knowledge discovery, and having survived library school, have a high tolerance for data modeling. Readily available tools for surfacing data and models, while impressive, have not yet crossed the threshold into a user-friendly domain - and by user, I mean the common man. MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, Flickr and the stable of Web 2.0 properties have pushed millions of users in the right direction, but we seem to be waiting for the next big thing. How do we help these users contribute to the long term strategy while giving them instant gratification?

How can we re-energize this two-pronged approach to selling the value and changing the plane of the game? Will it depend on a relatively small community of philanthropically minded advocates? Determining believable ROI data is difficult - it's often in soft-dollar savings which upper management is not as keen on. Sharing openly while protecting intellectual property rights is still a difficult concept for many.

Many things to think about and dig into - it's a great journey to be on.