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.

Let down badly by BMI, we have only just arrived, later than scheduled. But we’re soon over to PICNIC courtesy of Ramon the manic cab driver, a relatively painless registration, and then straight into today’s keynote: Charles Leadbetter on ‘How to sell books and secure your place on the lecture - ‘ No, that’s wrong. It’s called ‘We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity’ - We-Think being Charles Leadbetter’s book. And to be fair, Mr Leadbeater’s banging his we-think drum calmly and methodically: it’s all about collaboration.

Collaboration works and sometimes appears to work spontaneously in our new connected age, but don’t mistake this for anarchy. Collaboration has an anatomy and a structure and we can learn and  improve the new collaboration by studying, modelling and improving these.

It all makes sense but he’s no ball of fire.

The  problem is, this is no longer news. Everyone’s either read the book or the review, and everyone’s doing it, one way or another. And it’s a bit dull: The Journal of Ribonucleic Acid has just been invoked unless my ears are playing me false.

Scientists start with datasets… yes, we know, or maybe we only think we know)… Suddenly - following the obligatory ‘How many people here are satisfied by the results they get from Google?’ involve-the-crowd (collaborate with us, you fool!) question (nobody responds) - a personal anecdote: Charles Leadbeater felt like dancing when he first saw Google. Then it’s back to datasets.

From data, the scientists model it to test hypotheses. To get it peer reviewed they also need to share the software which tests the models. So the Open Source practice kicks in. And because of Open Source approach, more people get involved, which ups the pace, and so experiments results tend to be published daily, not just at the end of the test. Which drives further ongoing collaborative involvement for interested parties. True, true… The Genome Project, yes.

CL now invokes The Levellers as a collaborative movement that stopped, or failed. And then asks us a Big Question. His Big Question is,

“Are we going to screw it up?” Sage. Gnomic, almost. We don’t know. We say nothing.

He’s in the home straight now: name drop: I spent some time with Tim Berners-Lee, who is like Bill Gates, who CL also knows, they’re like twins apparently… Anyway, he asked TIm,

‘Are we asking too much of the Internet?’

TIm replied, ‘The danger is that we’ll ask too little.’

“I’ll leave it there.” <Applause>