PICNIC: We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity Part 2

After the applause, Clay Shirky, who will do his own keynote tomorrow. Like the man he joins, Charles Leadbetter, has a book to flog - Here Comes Everybody - and a reputation for conference work to boost. This is mean but true. Not unlike a band touring to flog a record has become writing a book to flog a public, authoritative persona.

They are having a chat up on the stage and sure, they’re both learned, interesting men, but this is not exactly exciting performance or leading thinking…

Shirky has a good riff on the problem of Reputation, and how peer review methodology made reputation look easy, how it’s a long-term, subtle investment, possibly in faith but based on evidence. Over time.

A question comes in from - I didn;t get her name but she describved herself as a ‘Boulder’, not a ‘Pebble’ (referencing a Time Berners-Lee metaphor about catalysts for collaboration - Jimmy Wales at Wikipedia, for example, or TB-L himself - wherein the first movers are, err, boulders, and the peole they enable and motivate to collaborate are, yes, pebbles. Hmmm.) so I assume she’s Someone. However, her question is rambling and unpointed, and provokes another agreeable series of takes on ‘How can we get better about collaboration?’ from Messrs Leadbetter and Shirky.

 ’The successful collaborations like Linux and Wikipedia are far too weird for most corporations even to consider right now’, admits Clay, likeably.

‘Henry Ford was a complete madman,’ adds Charles, agreeably - talking about assembly-line/mass production innovation.

What is coming through strongly now they have got into it is that this is going to take Time.

Innovation and adoption and understanding and better use of innovative nehaviour and technology does take time. The repetition thing is resonant. Saying stuff over and over and over and over again.  You have to pay to get out of going through everything twice, if I remember Memphis Blues Again correctly. This feels a lot like 1995-1999, when everyone involved repeated themselves over and over again, selling and re-selling the Internet to anyone who wanted it, and had something to bring to it - usually money. And then it happened and we stopped going on about the Internet because it was a done deal by then. Flash, Java - done deals, we don’t discuss them anymore. Proprietary, yes, but still collaborative above a certain, quite small scale. Then it was mobile intemittently, which still isn’t a done deal, and requires all kinds of hellish, currently still dysfunctional collaboration (carriers, operators, media owners, customers, governments…) and then Web 2.0 and social networking, which clearly is.

All of these were/are collaborative - and highly commercial - phases of technological and communication awareness and adoption, associated with network effects and bigger, more fragmented markets. Maybe this focus on the big picture of Collaboration is not really comprehensible - a Bigger Idea. Collaboration is an evolutionary advantage, surely - think pariahs, think outlaws - not a function of technology. The accelerated phases of innovation are  telling us more about how to do it, and do it better, is all. Which really isn;t that surprising.

‘We don’t have a coherent theory of gender’, says Clay earnestly, and I realise they’ve lost me and I’m merely doing some aimiable noodling around the subject myself. Which speaks well for the subject matter, which is intriguing, though not perhaps so well for the energy and originality of the stage. Good enough for arrival at PICNIC 08 after a 5am start though.