David Weinberger gives us a rundown on Clay Shirky’s talk at the Berkman Centre about Shirky’s new book "Here Comes Everybody".

At the risk of piggybacking on minds much more incisive and connective of dots than mine, I believe there’s reasonable chance that some day in the future we will see a commonly-used organizing principle that goes something like this:

"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results,

enabled by interconnected people and technology"

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Clay Shirky’s book talk

Clay Shirky is giving his book talk. Here Comes Everybody was released today. It’s immediately Become #1 at two Amazon lists. [Note: I’m typing quickly, getting things wrong, paraphrasing, etc. For an accurate report of what Clay’s book is about, please read Clay’s book.]

The Internet isn’t a decoration on society. It is a challenge. It is important on the order of print and broadcast. Previous media either were two way or they didn’t create groups. Now we have a network that is natively good at group forming. And this medium contains the contents of the others. In a single bullet point his book says: “Group action just got easier.”

Humans are great at forming groups. But they get complicated faster as they get large. A workgroup of 10 has four times more connections than a group of five. There are native disabilities once a group passes a certain size.

The typical answer has been to install a hierarchy. Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.

But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting.

Clay tells the story of his parents’ first date, a story that is not about internal combustion engines but that depends on the presence of them. We needed the Net to be always present and invisible for it to have its social effect.

Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action are rungs on a ladder: How much does an individual have to work to coordinate with the group?

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David’s blog post with examples of the rungs on the ladder …. sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action … continues here.

Can there be much doubt that at some point in the future our institutions and organizations will feel the impacts of sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action ?

Stan Davis on organizing in the future, from the 1987 book Future Perfect:

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"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization (here, we can read organization in the large sense, as a nation or society as well IMO) to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it.

What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.

Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both. We are still a long way from figuring out the appropriate and encompassing organization models for the economy we are now in."

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Tags: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Stan Davis, Future Perfect, hierarchy, networks, wirearchy

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David Gurteen reports in his most recent newsletter that Tom Davenport has agreed to understand that social software and social computing has a growing and perhaps central role in the ongoing evolution of knowledge work.

Last Sunday, two long flights that took up all day got me to Orlando, Florida at 1h00 am in the morning, and tired me out enough to help my body pick up bacterial bronchitis.

The FASTForward conference was interesting, as numerous speakers and session leaders pushed the meme of the user-centric future of algorithmically enhanced search as far as it seems it could go.

There was an explosion in a Starbucks late last night, no more three blocks from where we live.

I took a much-needed break in my swim-training program yesterday after logging three consecutive reasonably light training days Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

However, when I say reasonably light it’s useful to note that I am mixing it up quite a bit, starting to get into interval training so that I can build up my "kick", for example over the last 100 or 200 metres of sets that are of various lengths.

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A book was published several

There must be something in the water or the air, one would think.

This announcement comes from the P2P Foundation, spearheaded by Michel Bauwens.

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User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value

This new CRC report reveals the major drivers of user-led innovation and explores how it is affecting organisations’ relationships with key stakeholders.

It investigates how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. The report canvasses a number of pathways for organisations to leverage the participation of their audiences, customers and citizens in the interest of co-creating new products, services and platforms.

The research draws on extensive interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation including: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), John Howkins (Adelphi Charter), Michel Bauwens (P2P Alternatives) and Mitch Kapor (Linden Lab).

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The people interviewed, as cited, are certainly amongst those that are seen to carry significant authority in this Internet era.  The same can be said of the Aspen Institute Roundtable participants, who included John Seeley Brown, Joi Ito, John Hagel (featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward08 conference), Tom Malone of MIT, and other clearly credible folks.

At the risk of being seen to be involved in repeated and shameless self-promotion (I tagged this on to the previous post as well), I’d like to tag onto this emerging activity the working definition of wirearchy from a couple or so years ago.  I promise I’ll stop soon

"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"

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Tags: Collective Intelligenece, Co-creation of value, new paradigms, peer-to-peer, business models, wirearchy

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