Denise Caruso, author of the new book Intervention, has been thinking about risk. She looks at innovations that have had nasty unanticipated consequences. The way to avoid it? “Have a conversation.” Talk with people before hand. E.g., the company that was going to incinerate chemical weapons in Oregon talked with environmentalists and their ilk and came up with better means of disposal. People don’t always do this because they fear it.

And, Internet tolols and culture exacerbate it. Targeted search taks away serendipity. Blogger bubbles, etc.

There are “potential dealbreakers” for the Net, she says, including copyuright bs. social media. So, we need to re-socialize the Net. We should automate serendipity.

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Clay Shirky begins by talking about a disagreement in Japan about whether a temple is old even though it’s been rebuilt as part of continuing process. The dispute is over “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process.”

Then he talks about a big development contract he got many years ago with AT&T in which he was challenged to provide support. “We get our support from a community,” Clay said, but to them it was like he’d said “We get our Thursdays from a banana.” So, he showed them it working in practice. They couldn’t see it work in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory. He points to comp.lang.perl. “It’s doing fine,” but how is AT&T doing? Not so well. The solidity of the thing is evanescent.

Perl is like the temple, says Clay. It continues because the people doing it love Perl enough to stop what they’re doing and help one another. “No contracts are written, no money changes hands.” “We don’t often talk about love” at these conferences. But tools for coordinating and talking — simple things like mailing lists — turn love into a renewable building material. This leads to unexpected, unanticipated consequences. the better predictor of longevity is not the business model but do the people care about one another.

There’s lots of commercial opportunity. We’re not going to all live together in a commune. But the ability to get people together outside of management and profit motive creates a huge opportunity. And traditional work will be intertwined with this way of working.

Within 24 hours of Linus posting his first message, he had a global network of people eager to collaborate. The monitoring of Nigerian election through people using SMS and Flickr, the responses to terrorist actions, the anti-immigration-law protests coordinated through MySpace…we will see much more of that.

Add collaboration tools to love and you can write an operating system.

We can now do big things with love.

[This was a classic and beautiful statement of why the Net works and why it matters…and the fact that those two things are the same is what’s most hope-giving about the Net. Clay is such a phenomenal combination of insight, brilliance as a writer, and, well, love.]

[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 clay_shirky denise_caruso love social_software everything_is_miscellaneous]

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[The next day] Nick Douglas – who is hilarious to have on a backchannel chat – video interviewed me right after Clay’s talk, so the conversation turned to love and community.

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Doc and I did a panel, led by Jerry Michalski, on the state of markets as conversations. Most of the discussion was around Doc’s Vendor Relationship Management model. Interesting dicsussion with the audience.

(The Supernova “conversation hub” is here. And Isabel Walcott’s thorough bloggage of the session with Doc and me — with Isabel’s commentary — is here. BTW, this is part of the Wharton day, and this track is sponsored by Cisco. )

Now I’m in a session about people doing cool things in the nonprofit domain.

Maria Daniels of WGBH’s American Experience series talks about the Citizen Storytellers Project enables citizens to do video via cell phones. It’s an unfunded add-on to the series.

Howard Greenstein introduces a video of Farouk Olu Aregbe who created One Million Strong for Barack on FaceBook, from outside the Obama campaign. Then we get Farouk on the phone. What has he learned about creating social networks around candidates? One thing is that the regulatory environment is tough. And there are scaling issues. Q: Is your software available for other candidates? A: It’s Facebook and third party software.howard then introduces a video inteview with Rolando H. Brown of the non-profit Hip-Hop Association promoting hiphop as a way to support community values and social awareness. The foundation runs a film festival and educational conferences.

Susan [missed the last name] of TechSoup talks about the Nonprofit Commons Project . The Commons was donated by Anshe Chung, the first SL millionaire. It’s an island for nonprofits. Hundreds of member organizations get free space.One of the 1,300 Wikipedia administrators talks a bit about how its governed. [Again, sorry, couldn’t hear his name.] He’s working on categorization policy. He says that the policy to break categories up into smaller ones was based on the fact that a page can only display 200 linked articles. But, he says, that’s an unnatural limitation. So, he started experimenting with making tables of contents for large topics. Within a week, it was on over a thousand categories. Within a month, it was “accepted as gospel” that large categories ought to have a table of contents. It impressed him that good ideas were accepted so quickly. “Innovation takes small steps. Each has to be an improvement. That’s natural selection. That’s what wikis do.” [Tags: supernova2007 nonprofits npg]

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Dave has a rich piece on the problem with closed social networks. He concludes:

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

In my terms, he’s talking about social information going miscellaneous: Lots of it, detached from any particular app, a seedbed of emergence. There have been attempts to make this happen before — FOAF springs to mind — but they attempted to get us to write things down about ourselves independent of any application. FaceBook et al. make writing things down worth our while. So, the data is there. We just have to (a) get it everywhere, (b) provide strong user control over it. (A is likely to happen before B does. But you never know. At least I never know.)

Dave also wants more-better metadata, especially with regards to the types of relationships these sites capture. Jeez, do I agree. For most of my friends at Facebook, the available categories are inadequate. A folksonomic approach would turn up far more interesting relationships. As it stands, FaceBook requires us to reduce this richest of social information. [Tags: social_networks dave_winer facebook identity everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Peter Lurie has a long-ish post called “Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks” in which he explains the way in which hyperlinks embody deconstructionist views. Given that I used “deconstruct” twice in a sentence describing the piece, it is remarkably clear.

Peter thinks hyperlinks contain an implicit politics: “The Web is a postmodernist tool that inevitably produces a postmodernist perspective.” I think so, too, although I’m not quite as optimistic. There are too many ways the Net could go wrong.

FWIW, Peter and I are thinking along the same lines. Small Pieces Loosely Joined was on a very similar theme, and he should like (or possibly find very annoying) the end of Everything Is Miscellaneous, which argues that we are now building for one another a messy infrastructure of meaning…

(Thanks to Terry Heaton for the link.) [Tags: hyperlinks peter_laurie philosophy postmodernism]

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I was a guest on Dennis Prager‘s conservative radio talk show yesterday. I was supposed to be talking about Everything is Miscellaneous, but the conversation, not surprisingly, turned to whether the Net’s end run around authority is good for the left, right, or both. I thought Prager conducted a very good interview; I’m less happy with my responses.

I’m having trouble telling exactly what the permalink is for the podcast, but try here. If not, look for the June 14, 2007 show. I start at 10:20 and go to 23:36. (By the way, he introduces me as an “Internet advisor to Howard Dean.” Because time was short, I didn’t correct him to say that I was a volunteer Internet advisor to the Dean campaign, which is closer to the truth. I doubt very much that Dean would remember me.)

Supernova, a conference I’m going to and will be speaking at (debating Andrew Keen, among other things), is posting brief videos of people answering the question “What is the new network.” My response and Andrew Rasiej’s are here.

[Tags: dennis_prager supernova2007 everything_is_miscellaneous]

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John Palfrey and Erin Mishkin are leading a Tuesday lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center about the “digital natives” project, which “explores what it means to be born digital.” The hypothesis is that there’s a gap between those born digital and those who came to it at some point in their lives…and the gap is larger than we think.

JP acknowledges right at the beginning that many others know much more than the people on the project do about what’s goin’ on with the kids. He hopes that a formal project will emerge from the past few years of informal research and discussion. From the project he hopes will come public policy suggestions that reflect the differences. E.g., privacy laws reflect digital immigrants’ assumptions

Those who were born digital have a sense that they’re always on. (The project will involve research beyond the US, by the way.) JP now goes through some of the slides from the talk he gave at the Internet & Society 2007 on June 1. Stray points from what he says today:

– Online identities frequently are made to be different from the rw identity “because I can.”

– The most important global trend that ties natives to one another is that they’re creators. (He shows a bunch of great clips by kids and amateurs.)

– What might privacy law and policy look like if it reflected the digital native ethos? E.g., FaceBook and MySpace give a good set of controls, although they’re hard to use. But what happens if a friend posts an embarrassing photo of you? At FaceBook, you can remove it, but not at all networking sites. Or suppose a friend posts at Flickr an embarrassing photo of you and tags it with your name. You can’t get rid of it. Finally, imagine a friend posts the same photo of you, but doesn’t tag it with your name…but a face recognition system does. All these are google-able and part of your online identity. How should public policy reflect and react?

– JP’s got a book deal, with Urs Gasser, from Basic Books. It’s out in 2008, and it’s aimed at lawyers.

Now Erin talks about the project. They’ll be doing a bunch of interviews.

They had a logo contest for people under 18 and got 200 entries. A 15 year old Brit won.

There is then lively discussion about the questions the project should be asking. Too rollicking to blog well. So, I’ll blog it badly. The following points and questions were raised by various people:

If the technology is transforming the way natives “socialize, engage in the political process, and engage themselves” (which JP and Erin pose as a question, but which I’m taking as an assertion), then how can policy created by immigrants and stay-at-home reflect that? How can policy keep up with “quicksilver”?

What’s the driving force? Technology? Social norms? Policy?

The interviews may affect the natives’ attitude towards exposing too much info on social sites.

How can the project use Facebook to get natives talking about this topic?

Empirical issue: What is due to developmental issues and what is due to the tech? To sort this out, strong collaboration among this team and other teams in other areas (e.g., Project Zero) would be helpful.

Today’s digital natives are still in the childhood of the technology. It’s the next generation that will be true natives. OTOH, by the time the current natives are adults, the environment will have changed.

[“If you __________, you might be a digital native.” Could be a way to generate some interest. E.g.: If you think email should be saved for wedding invitations and pink slips, you might be a digital native. If you get bored before you can finish writing a Tweeter post, you might be a digital native. Ok, maybe not such a great idea.]

[Tags: berkman digital_natives]

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Here’s the audio of my closing comments at the Internet & Society Conference last week, the theme of which was open access. In it, I say that the Web is revealing knowledge to us as it has always been, and urge that we not be too realistic as we address the Web’s potential. I also pay homage to Charlie Nesson ‘s vision of the university leading the fight to keep the Internet open and free. My comments were freeform, composed just a few minutes before the talk (because I was supposed to be responding to the day), and very informal. The audio is 20 minutes long. [Tags: is2k7 berkman charlie_nesson knoweldge open_access]

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The latest in the Miscellaneous Podcast series I’ve been doing, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired, is now up at Wired. Craig Newmark (the Craig of CraigsList) and I talk about why strategic planning can get in a business’ way and the value of working with limited resources. [Tags: craigslist craig_newmark business strategy newspapers media ]

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Leisa Rechelt posts about her talk on “Ambient Intimacy” at Reboot, and includes her slide show (which is almost all graphics and snippets…and looks terrific).

Ambient Intimacy is a term to describe that sense of connectedness that you get from participating in social tools online that allow you to feel as though you are maintaining and, perhaps in fact, increasing your closeness with people in your social network through the messages and content that you share online – be it photographs or text or information about upcoming travel.

There are lots of other terms that people have used to describe this kind of connected experience including Situational Awareness, Hyper-Connectivity, Hive Mind, Social Presence, Distributed Co-Presence etc. I still prefer Ambient Intimacy because it combined the human ‘ickyness’ of ‘intimacy’ with the distributed and non-directional nature of ‘ambiance’.

These are all ways of getting at the fundamental paradox that the Web is a crowd of unique faces, a roar of distinct voices, a choreography of Brownian motion, an intimacy of details, distributed friendship, communities of acquaintances, topic-based affection, a continuous intermittency, a plenum of parts… [Tags: leisa_reichelt ambient_intimacy reboot09 everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Moira Gunn interviewed me for TechNation about Everything is Miscellaneous. We talk about the three orders of order, “meta-business,” Wikipedia as a guide to what humans are interested in, and the Internet and politics. Here’s the excerpt. [Tags: moira_gunn wikipedia politics business everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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