2007/05/21
Sermo: Web 2.0 in a "Closed" Community
One of the more interesting talks I've seen lately at a professional meeting was one given yesterday by Alex Frost, a VP for a company called Sermo, at the first full day of the annual meeting of the Council of Science Editors. Briefly, Sermo has built a terrific online-community platform for physicians that enables discussion of current techniques -- essentially a "what would you prescribe in this situation" kind of virtual water cooler that addresses the demise of traditional meatspace social networking (e.g., the old Tuesday afternoon golf game) at which clinical problems would be discussed and hashed out. Excellent user interface, and seemingly all the right choices with respect to functionality. And the business model was interesting, too -- basically, the physicians participate for free, and the revenues come from outside concerns (e.g., the drug companies) looking to tap into the front-line knowledge being exchanged on the site. The talk was roughly twice as long as a typical CSE presentation, but just seemed to get more and more interesting.
What really grabbed me about this, though, was that although this application is Web 2.0 to the core -- both from the point of view of the AJAX-y implementation and the whole approach to social networking, content weighting based on user votes, etc. -- it kind of turns the Web 2.0 "openness" mantra on its head. Sermo is very much a closed user community; indeed, the entire system is premised on an automated credentialing system that verifies the qualifications of people who join and freezes out anyone else. (For this reason, Sermo is right now limited to U.S. physicians, as the problems with extending the automated credentialing to folks in other countries are a bit too knotty.) Indeed, Sermo's viability would appear to depend on this kind of strict attention to credentialing, as well as user anonymity, which is strictly enforced, and the site's ability to remain independent from the drug companies and others with a vested interest. (Independent in terms of content creation, at least; as I mentioned, the drug companies and other external users do pay Sermo to get access to the crowd wisdom embodied in Sermo's actual postings.)
Obviously, there's nothing in Web 2.0, strictly speaking, that rules out a closed community, and indeed, Sermo seems to be built on a classic "Architecture of Participation". But colloquially, I think many of us tend to think of large, open, freewheeling communities like del.icio.us and Digg, which require/promote breadth and inclusiveness across the board, when we think of this sort of architecture; Sermo relies heavily on precisely the opposite. It's a "gated community", and needs to be so for its own viability. (On a slightly off-topic note, I also thought that Sermo represents a very useful corrective to the disproportionate influence of the drug companies on physicians -- by providing a "safe space" where physicians can discuss issues among themselves without pharma promotion or blandishments, it seemed, at least to me, to offer a useful vehicle for some frank discussion of things like the appropriateness of some of the off-label uses for drugs that are such a big part of pharma marketing. But I will now get back down from the soapbox.)
There was an awful lot more that was interesting about this talk, and I wish I had time to put it all together. For example, looking at something more germane to scienific publishing sensu strictu, there was a riff on Sermo as a vehicle for post-publication (and even pre-publication) peer review. Because of its emphasis on anonymity and credentialing, a Sermo-like site seems like a better vehicle for such vetting than something like Nature's blog-based open peer review experiment -- which I still believe, as I suggested in this post, was crimped by the fact that the likeliest contributors to such a process were precisely those who had the most to lose by attaching their name to a critical review in an open forum.
Anyway: a very thought-provoking talk from Alex, and one that has me, at least, very excited about the exportability of some of these ideas to other contexts.
What really grabbed me about this, though, was that although this application is Web 2.0 to the core -- both from the point of view of the AJAX-y implementation and the whole approach to social networking, content weighting based on user votes, etc. -- it kind of turns the Web 2.0 "openness" mantra on its head. Sermo is very much a closed user community; indeed, the entire system is premised on an automated credentialing system that verifies the qualifications of people who join and freezes out anyone else. (For this reason, Sermo is right now limited to U.S. physicians, as the problems with extending the automated credentialing to folks in other countries are a bit too knotty.) Indeed, Sermo's viability would appear to depend on this kind of strict attention to credentialing, as well as user anonymity, which is strictly enforced, and the site's ability to remain independent from the drug companies and others with a vested interest. (Independent in terms of content creation, at least; as I mentioned, the drug companies and other external users do pay Sermo to get access to the crowd wisdom embodied in Sermo's actual postings.)
Obviously, there's nothing in Web 2.0, strictly speaking, that rules out a closed community, and indeed, Sermo seems to be built on a classic "Architecture of Participation". But colloquially, I think many of us tend to think of large, open, freewheeling communities like del.icio.us and Digg, which require/promote breadth and inclusiveness across the board, when we think of this sort of architecture; Sermo relies heavily on precisely the opposite. It's a "gated community", and needs to be so for its own viability. (On a slightly off-topic note, I also thought that Sermo represents a very useful corrective to the disproportionate influence of the drug companies on physicians -- by providing a "safe space" where physicians can discuss issues among themselves without pharma promotion or blandishments, it seemed, at least to me, to offer a useful vehicle for some frank discussion of things like the appropriateness of some of the off-label uses for drugs that are such a big part of pharma marketing. But I will now get back down from the soapbox.)
There was an awful lot more that was interesting about this talk, and I wish I had time to put it all together. For example, looking at something more germane to scienific publishing sensu strictu, there was a riff on Sermo as a vehicle for post-publication (and even pre-publication) peer review. Because of its emphasis on anonymity and credentialing, a Sermo-like site seems like a better vehicle for such vetting than something like Nature's blog-based open peer review experiment -- which I still believe, as I suggested in this post, was crimped by the fact that the likeliest contributors to such a process were precisely those who had the most to lose by attaching their name to a critical review in an open forum.
Anyway: a very thought-provoking talk from Alex, and one that has me, at least, very excited about the exportability of some of these ideas to other contexts.
