August 14th, 2006
My friend Tom DeMarco, a software guru and co-author (among other things) of the highly acclaimed Waltzing With Bears, commented on the blog that I wrote a couple days ago about Wiki Terror:
“There was a much more public proposal made last year that would address this same issue in a crowd-sourcing approach, though not a wiki: the terrorism futures market. I heard a very persuasive argument for this approach by Susan Lee on a recent Marketplace.
“Futures markets organized around such issues work like wikis, but have the added dimension that they are quantitative. They provide a mechanism for new ideas to surface and be elaborated, and then by the dollars that get bet on them, an indication of how likely they may be.”
It certainly makes sense to me. I’d much rather see a quantitative dollar estimate of the likelihood that someone will blow up a plane departing from Heathrow in the next month than trying to comprehend the distinction between the British government’s security classification of “severe” versus “critical” — or, for that matter, the Homeland Security color-coded levels of “red and “high orange.”
