Here comes Clay!

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.