It’s Friday morning now, the last day of the festival, and I am playing catch-up bigtime now.  More technical problems have interrupted the real-time, gonzo plan for reporting on PICNIC08; but so has PICNIC08 itself.

The momentum of the day here is deceptive. It starts at dream pace, seems to be moving very slowly and then suddenly it’s getting dark. You get here early and attend to business - which for me means meeting colleagues, clients, checking the delivery of LBiQ4, setting up the stand in the bookshop and delivering some copies around the campus. The Westergasfabriek is a big area and it takes ten minutes to go from end to end. But it’s still early and it’s been awesome weather and you enjoy the walk, and you’re still ahead of the first lecture so you nail a few coffees, wake up properly, do some writing and post some of it. All is still in hand.

Then you go to a conference session, and the time machine starts playing up. It’s intense, expert, fascinating stuff, a garganutan feast of futuristic thinking, and you’re typing as fast as you can, working on yesterday’s bog while noting the session you’re in, and dealing with some eamil you are foolish enough to have let trhough the filter, and then the session’s over and you’re still writing, but you have to go check the magazine rack, which you do and that’s good, people are picking up on the new issue, and you chat to a couple of interested punters about what it is and why we do it and why it and LBi might be useful things to know about, and it turns out this guy runs new media division for some branch of the Dutch government so we swap cards and agree we should talk, network network, this is why we come here.

But there’s still the rest of the last session to write up and post, and the next session to get to, but then you meet an old friend you haven’t seen for eleven years, since you both left The Start-Up That Failed, on the same day, and that requires ten minutes of high speed catch-up and card-swapping, and looky here, you’re now running a contract publishing business and you need a marketing agency to help work out what to do and we’re talking to publishers about how to take LBiQ to the next step commercially, we have  business to do here, network network.

But the session past and the session future are still calling, only then Annemiek calls and says there’s coffee going on with some clients, so you decide to skip the next session and finish the write-up sitting just here in the sun with a coffee but uh oh, here’s Igor and the Dutch Railways client and you say hello, and that’s a pleasant chat but my goodness, is it 11.45 already, must put out more magazines, grab 30 minutes on the blog but you’re now running out of power and you have a 12.30 appoointment to meet colleagues… On and on it goes. It’s like playing in an orchestra - miss abeat and you’re doomed.

So at some point I’ll post my impressions of sessions led by the massively impressive Geneveive Bell and Adam Greenfield, as well as notes on some cool people I met. When, I’m not sure. I’m currently in a presentation with Ben Ceverny, who is talking my kind of language, talking about mental prostheses which enable us to turn data into understanding like lead into gold, our philosopher’s stone the CPU. Quite literally magic - and I wish I could stay for it because I now have to go sort out the mags again - even though he’s onto awesome looking and sounding stuff, explaing how the Lorenzo(?) Pattern in phase space is described by reindeer in Lapland, and then, via a neat reference to collapsing the Higgs Field, he leaps on to how he’s mapping news story flow though Digg Swarm… I can think of ten clients we should be  talking to about running similar projects to help them and us better understand where their optimal information areas are - their nodes.

So I’m just making a note to research this a bit and then present it back to the relevant UK team, when a text comes in telloing me I need to be somewhere else…

 This is what PICNIC is like: intense, over-stimulating, far too much to do and think about and too many people to meet and not long enough. But it does provide you with enough ideas to last a season or two, and possibly longer.

So now it’s the interesting one from yesterday’s equaivalent of a nice quiet drive in the country on a Sunday afternoon with Uncle Charles (sorry, I’ll stop dissing it now, but it was a *very* tame start to proceedings - it lacked drama). Yes, it’s the ‘Bald Tom Hanks’ of new community theory, the collaborative charismatic with the agreeably memorable name - ladies and gentelemen, Mr Clay Shirky.

H’ray, say the crowd. There’s more people here now, and definitely a sense of more  happening, of it being Day 2 of PICNIC08, a quickening of the pace.

Now this is quite cool - if true. Clay admits straight off that his trademark riff - ‘the social effects of the internet are getting really interesting’ - is now passe. He realised it yesterday when he was working on stage with Mr Leadbeater and felt unnerved to realise that we’d all ‘got’ that now -  that Everybody Has, in fact, Arrived, thus rendering his prophecy (Here Comes Everybody) fulfilled, and therefore useless at a conference about the future. 

We need the next steps, not last year’s news. He pictures us sitting and asking/telling him, “Here we are now - entertain us.” So he claims to have gone away and rewritten his presentation last night.

The results of the rewrite? He is going to give us four and half stories about sharing, collaboration and collective action.

It turns into a thing about social dilemmas. Unlike a problem, which can be solved, at which point it stops being a problem, a dilemma is a dilemma, always was, always will be, and can only be optimised. I am not sure I agree with that.

Social dilemmas are to do with human behaviour, and the intricate, highly evolved attitude and experience we have to/of social behaviour. They are not user experience problems that can be fixed by better design or features in environments - which online means software.

The examples are kind of interesting, sort of instructive, kind of obvious - but then again, I didn’t know about them, so they’re worth outlining…

The first is about a High Dynamic Range photography image on Flickr that spawned a comprehensive seminar and permanent knowledge artefact about High Dynamic Range photography. It took three months to do the equivalent, thinks Clay, of five years work if you’d tried to do it the other way round - gather community, discuss and publish. By publishing, then discussing, the gathering - which is the hardest bit of community building - happened by itself and a positive feedback loop kicked in.

Yes, but it still doesn’t explain why that particualr social object - the HDR picture that sparked it all, the Social Object - was the right trigger or catalyst or boulder, hah, to get the pebbles of the landslide rolling… or whatever metaphor it is we use to distinguish prime mover genius from first follower from herd, maven from connector from salesperson… Anyway, it was all good natured and proactive and ended up being incredibly valuable to anyone who needed that kind of information; and, most importantly, it required no instructions or rules.

There was no dilemma. There are puzzles to be solved - why did it happen and can it be replicated? -  because if you could bottle that and sell it you’d be as rich as Tim Berners-Lee’s more successful twin brother; but it’s not a dilemma. Apparently.

At Black and White Maniacs (also on Flickr), on the other hand, there are a set of VERY SHOUTY RULES that reveal that site users are meant to do a simple thing, simply: post an image, comment on two others, don’t post without commenting and never post twice in a row - let someone else post after you’re finished. So why the for need rules, beyond these  straightforward guidelines?

Because people won’t play nicely. They start commenting ‘OK’ and ‘Cool’ and other such brevities, which is out of whack with the site managers’ expectations of what a comment it, it looks too perfunctory for their liking, and so another rule kicks in about PLEASE NOT TO DO THIS or WE’LL BAN YOU. YOU MUST WRITE TWO NICE COMMENTARIES for every picture you post or it’s NOT FAIR. This is a dilemma: people have differing expectations of each others’ behaviour, and need to be synchronised.

Story number two was about Bronze Beta, a Buffy site. I’ll leave Buffy fan Duncan to talk about this in his own way over at LBiQ.net, but the insight from an increasingly impressive Clay was that when the site users commissioned a rebuild (in the face of corporate interference) they demanded it feature-free, resulting in what effectively a ‘text dump’, which is all the fans want.

Use of tools is an individual choice, but when it is social, usage has to be synchronised. The mental model has to be synchronised. Good stuff, Clay Shirky, this is where the answers lie - in the deeper understanding of Experience and the recognition of its complexity, and therefore the prtoblems inherent in designing or architecting *spits* ‘Exepriences’ in anything pother than their entirety - very much a mental modelling problem.

This is why you have to simplify to coordinate in order to collaborate. And apparently - according to Clay and I’d like to see some figures that ‘prove’ this - social networks are getting simpler. They are deploying fewer and fewer features, because it is easier to standardise and synchronise around the fewest possible features. If this is true then reduction of rules ought to be reflected in increased optimisation of the size of the dilemma.

The feature free Bronze Beta, though, weirdly, inversely,  has many rules. largely incredibly trivial, about not using coloured text and so on. Is this because the rules need to be revisited and constantly resynchronised to keep optimising the shifting dilemma, which mutates because communities are complex and exist in ‘real time’ and are therefore endlessly mutable? Or because Clay Shirky is making this up as he goes along? Discuss. I think the former but I’m losing focus…

Two and a half more stories. The one about the Galileo page on Wikipedia, which has been locked down except to moderators, is the standout. The long tail is invoked, demonstrating that the <20% ‘head and neck’ of the graph are the small minority who  contribute and edit the most by far. The ‘tail’ consists of thousands of one-off users who makes one change or addition only. They are the ones who ‘know’ the least, are least expert, the most opinionated and prejudiced and do most damaged to the validity of the consensus. The experts are the minority on the left. This minority thus have to be issued with defensive tools to protect the validity of the site - the lock down for example. This throws the wisdom of crowds concept into some doubt. It’s a social dilemma, optimisable through the exercise of minority power.

The half story was a rerun of the stuff about the sharecropping sheep guy from yesterday , which Duncan has covered, and the fourth was a Facebook rebellion by students protesting and demonstrating and winning against HSBC last year when they reneged on their student bank charge policy, and were  promptly and roundly trounced by the better-informed and better-organised Facebook student network.

Thinking Is For Doing, said Henry James, echoing my own failed ‘Mantra for 2008′, ‘Doing It Is The new Thinking About It’. Publishing Is For Acting, says Shirks, which sounds a bit cryptic to me, like a crossword clue, when taken out of context.

Clay’s going for the finishing line now. STOP energy has ruled the world historically, but the the creative productive energy is what has driven the online commnities. Freedom not restriction, opportunity not risk, the desire to dreate not the desire to constrain. Yes, and?

In 1980 Xerox delivered the first laser printer and its importance is in where it went, to MIT, where Richard Stallman worked, and where he saw the future, which was Xerox and others like them killing everything with proprietary, closed source code licences. Three years later the GNU Public Licence was announced - ’share and share alike’ basically - which actually solved the social dilemma of, say, the Black and White Maniac Flickr thing. The rules are clear, and fixed, and mutually beneficial, and make those who agree to work within them interdependent upon the common good, yes.

There is no licence for collective action. But when collective action groups form, they are massively effective. We should look at why and what the equivalent of the GNU Public Licence for collective action might look like.

Very good session - a lot to digest here.