Twenty thousand conversations

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1665 and all that To get an idea of where rapid responses might be heading, it's instructive to know where we've come from. Before journals, letters were the main means for scholars to communicate ideas. Official scientific societies gave a great spur to this traffic in letters. At their meetings, letters were read out from the societies' correspondents, and these filled many pages of the first scientific journals. 8 9 In these early days of scientific publishing, the notion that a community's musings were discrete from journal “content” was an alien one—both were forms of conversation. Fast forwarding to today, we find conversations once again counting as important content—rapid responses now make up 40% of the searchable content of bmj.com; within three years there will be more rapid responses than articles. If the internet returns us to the pre-journal model of knowledge creation by conversation then the conversations are likely to be qualitatively different from what has gone before. Participants need not be in the same room at the same time, and there is no limit to their number. Mario Morino, who studies the internet and social change, believes that tapping into the collective intelligence of thousands of people using the web could provide a new model for problem solving: “The power of bringing together the right minds around a subject in an online dialogue, well facilitated, well deliberated, has enormous potential to help us get through issues that we've never solved before.”10 He cites the success of the open source movement in software, where the freely given efforts of hundreds of software developers have produced solutions unobtainable by the usual methods of problem solving.11 Our experiment began with moving letters to the editor to bmj.com. Should it matter that we don't know how it will end up? Levy counsels us against expecting the digital world to be neat and tidy so soon: we are just at the beginning of figuring it all out. “Moving existing genres online doesn't mean that they'll be stable,” he writes. “Indeed, it pretty much guarantees that they won't be.”12
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